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Steak and kidney pie is a popular British dish. It is a savoury pie filled principally with a mixture of diced beef, diced kidney (which may be beef, lamb, veal, or pork) and onion. Its contents are generally similar to those of steak and kidney puddings.
 A steak and kidney pie, as served in a pub | |
| Type | Savoury pie |
|---|---|
| Place of origin | Britain |
| Serving temperature | Hot |
| Main ingredients |
|
In modern times the fillings of steak and kidney pies and steak and kidney puddings are generally identical,[1] but until the mid-19th century the norms were steak puddings and kidney pies.[2][n 1] Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 1826, records a large dish of kidney pies in the window of a baker near Smithfield,[4] and ten years later a kidney-pie stand outside what is now the Old Vic, emitting sparks every time the vendor opened his portable oven to hand a hot kidney pie to a customer.[5]
"Rump Steak and Kidney Pie" was served in a Liverpool restaurant in 1847,[6] and in 1863 a Birmingham establishment offered "Beef Steak and Kidney Pie".[7] But until the 1870s kidney pies are far more frequently mentioned in the newspapers, including one thrown at a policeman during an affray in Knightsbridge in 1862,[8] and an assault case in Lambeth in 1867 when a customer attacked a waitress for bringing her a beef pie instead of a kidney one.[9] By the mid-1870s steak and kidney pies were as often mentioned as kidney ones. Both appeared in verse of the period:
You say you are too sad to eat!
Just hand your plate and try
This steak and kidney pie, my love–
This steak and kidney pie.
From Fun, 1875[10]
I've eaten as much as a man could eat,
I've gone through a very remarkable feat;
From the twopenny tart to the kidney pie,
I've swallowed as much as I could, have I.
From The Zoo (1875), by B. C. Stephenson and Arthur Sullivan[11]
According to the cookery writer Jane Grigson, the first published recipe for the combination of steak and kidney was in 1859 in Mrs Beeton's Household Management.[12][n 2] Beeton used it in a pudding rather than a pie. She had been sent the recipe by a correspondent in Sussex in south-east England, and Grigson speculates that it was until then a regional dish, unfamiliar to cooks in other parts of Britain.[12]
Beeton suggested that steak and kidney could be "very much enriched" by the addition of mushrooms or oysters.[13] In those days oysters were the cheaper of the two: mushroom cultivation was still in its infancy in Europe and oysters were still commonplace.[12] In the following century Dorothy Hartley (1954) recommended the use of black-gilled mushrooms rather than oysters, because long cooking is "apt to make [oysters] go hard".[1][n 3]
Neither Beeton nor Hartley specified the type of animal from which the kidneys were to be used in a steak and kidney recipe. Grigson (1974) calls for either veal or ox kidney,[12] as does Marcus Wareing.[14] Other cooks of modern times have variously specified lamb or sheep kidney (Marguerite Patten, Nigella Lawson and John Torode),[15] ox kidney (Mary Berry, Delia Smith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall),[16] veal kidney (Gordon Ramsay),[17] either pork or lamb (Jamie Oliver),[18] and either ox, lamb or veal kidneys (Gary Rhodes).[19]
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Some versions are full, or "double-crust", pies, in which the cooking dish is lined with pastry before the meat mixture is added, after which a pastry top is put over it.[20] In other versions the meat is put straight into the dish, with only a pastry lid.[21] In either case, a pie funnel is often used to stop the top crust sinking into the meat mixture during baking.[22] Some recipes call for puff pastry; others for shortcrust.[21] In some the meat is cooked before going into the pie;[23] in others it goes in raw.[1] In addition to the steak and kidney, the filling typically contains carrots and onions, and is cooked in one or more of beef stock, red wine and stout.[24]
The steak and kidney pie is found in numerous regional variants. In the West Country clotted or double cream may be poured into the pie through a hole in the pastry topping just before serving.[25] The Ormidale pie from the Scottish Highlands is flavoured with a teaspoon each of Worcestershire sauce, vinegar and tomato sauce.[25] In East Yorkshire sliced potatoes are substituted for kidneys and the dish is called meat and pot pie.[25] In the English Midlands, Northern England and Scotland oysters or mushrooms or both are often added; in Scotland this variant is known as Musselburgh pie.[25]
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Among the various vernacular names for steak and kidney pie are Kate and Sidney pie, snake and kiddy pie, and snake and pygmy pie.[26] Eric Partridge dates the first of these to around 1880.[27] A substantial part of the plot of P. G. Wodehouse's 1963 comic novel Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves hinges on the disruptive allure of a magnificent steak and kidney pie for a young man whose fiancée has decreed that he must turn vegetarian.[28]
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