A “Traditional” Steak and Kidney recipe

I have to say that this is not one of my mother's, in fact it's not a family recipe at all!  It's basically the filling of a pudding without the suet pastry.

Take a pound of steak and kidney. Roughly chop an onion and two cloves of garlic. Layer them in a stone crock dish. Traditionally, you would roll the diced steak and kidney in seasoned flour, then layer them in the crock, and then pour in enough boiling water to almost cover the mixture. That makes a tasty enough meal. However, I'd rather add half a pint of gravy, made by adding half a pint of boiling water to a dessertspoon of gravy granules, a beef Oxo cube crumbled and a tablespoon of tomato puree, then stir thoroughly and add Henderson's Relish (or Worcester Sauce if you have the misfortune not to come from Sheffield). The liquid should come almost up to the top of the meat mix. Cover and cook in a very slow oven (about Gas 1 or 2) for at least 3 hours. If you wish, you could cook it in a slow cooker for over 6 hours. Half an hour before serving, you may like to add a few halved or quartered mushrooms.

If you want to have pastry with it, a nice suet pastry could make a pie crust. It doesn't need to be steamed, roll it out thin and use it as you would short pastry. Add the filling after it has been cooked, moisten with the gravy, top with suet pastry and eggwash. Cook in a medium hot oven (about Gas 7) for 45 minutes.

To make a Steak and Ale pie, instead of the gravy mix, just pour half a pint of a well-flavoured beer into the mix, and add a bayleaf to counter the bitterness of the hops which becomes more pronounced on cooking. Guinness works well or you could use a good bitter such as Black Sheep.

It's traditional to serve it with mashed potatoes and carrots, but a baked potato also goes down really well with it. Chips are overkill, in my opinion. But you've got to have something to mop up all that yummy gravy!

Rice pudding

Couldn't be simpler really. 1 pint full fat milk, 2oz pudding rice, 2oz sugar. Cook in a casserole dish for 2 - 3 hours at Gas 2 or 3, 140 or 150C. You could add a knob of butter and a grating of nutmeg on top if you like.

Dad used to eat the skin, which was just fine because it used to make me gag. I only discovered the joys of pudding skin many years later.

So how did I get it so wrong last year? I put the pudding in to cook as per instructions above. I woke with a start at about 11pm, some 6 hours after I put the pudding in the oven. OMG! Nothing for it but to scrape the burn offering out in the morning, after it had cooled down.

But hang on. I looked inside the crockpot to find yes, some of it had burnt round the outside, but in the middle it was fairly solid and a deep golden yellow colour. Maybe it was salvageable?

What I'd made, inadvertently, was a caramelised condensed milk rice pudding, with all the yummy flavour of caramel from the burnt sugar, and of condensed milk as what had not been absorbed by the rice had been boiled away. I spooned what wasn't too burnt out, and poured a little top of the milk over it, and we had it for supper. "You must burn the pudding more often" said Hubby.

So don't assume that because something looks ruined that it necessarily is. Often something can be salvaged from it. Like the cake I made without any eggs. I cut it up and used it as the base for a trifle. Sometimes you can make something from the most unpromising disaster with a little ingenuity.

The Wisdom of Pies part 1

What every mother used to know was that a double-crust pie meant you could feed more people with cheaper ingredients and less of them. My Nan knew that a Robirch's Steak and Kidney pie, heated up in the Baby Belling specially for her only grandchild (me), would feed me so well I'd sleep most of the afternoon. What I know is that pies are today much maligned. People think they're fattening, full of cholesterol and Not a Good Thing for people. Balderdash! I'll tell you why.

If you're eating a pie, you need to adjust the way you think about what you eat. The crust is the carbohydrate part of your food, so you don't need chips or potatoes. (I am aware this is heresy, by the way. I am here to tell you good people how to eat well cheaply, which is an art we have lost by and large in this country. So pie does not need chips.) All a portion of pie needs as accompaniments are fresh vegetables and gravy. With the exception of pork pie if you're living North of the Trent, of course. There pork pies are warmed up, served floating in a sea of mushy peas, and crowned with a sprinkling of mint sauce.

Going back to my childhood, Sunday lunch was completed by pie for pudding. Apple pie or rhubarb pie by preference, but gooseberry pie also featured in season. With custard of course! These days I prefer to make crumble, but that's because I find rolling out pastry is a bit much on the old arms and I prefer to leave pastry rolling for savoury pies. A savoury pie for the main course meant you didn't have a pie for pudding, and vice versa. One can have too much of a good thing, you know!

I moved to South Yorkshire in my late 20s, and there I was introduced to the joys of Meat and Potato Pie by my new in-laws. I never got the recipe though, but I'll describe it to you. A layer of stewed beef on the bottom with some potatoes mixed in it, then thickly sliced potatoes on top of that making a rounded top, with short crust pastry over that, richly decorated. A hole in the middle to let steam out. Baked in medium oven for about 30 - 45 minutes I'd say. But served, always served with boiled carrots and Henderson's Relish. (Google it. They have a website and a Facebook page)

The pastry for pies needn't be this fancy flaky puffy stuff either! A good short pastry takes the crown every time. Mom would use half lard and half marge for hers: all butter is expensive, all lard gives a very short (i.e. crumbly) pastry but not much flavour. Plain flour was always used, but self raising will give a bit more rise to the pastry if that's what you want. Pastry benefits from being kept cold and handled as little as possible. Some women had "good hands" for pastry. I never quite knew what that means, but at a guess it meant they had long fingers and cold hands. The "long fingers" part would mean that, when they are rubbing the fat in to the flour, the minimum amount of flesh comes into contact with the pastry which keeps it cool. Mom always said you should use iced water to mix the pastry with, at the very least the water had to be as cold as you could get it and freshly drawn.

If you're doing a steak and kidney pie you could use a suet pastry. These days you can get vegetable suet, but in my childhood all we had was Atora beef suet. I prefer to make suet pastry as you don't need to rub the fat in, just mix it with a knife until it forms a ball. Then you knead it to make sure it's smooth, and roll out. If you roll it thinly enough, it becomes very crispy which I like.

Some years ago Delia Smith showed how to make a one-crust pie, which was basically rolling the pastry out, putting the filling on the pastry, then bringing the edges up towards the middle and baking it like that. Mom used to make something similar if she had pastry left over: she'd get a saucer, roll the pastry out and line the saucer with it, put jam in the middle and bring the edges up. But Mom would join the edges in the middle. She called it a "turnover".

Banana magic 2

Sometimes you just want something sweet, hot, quick and simple. Mom had the answer: banana or apple custard.

Just make up half a pint of custard, and either slice a banana or grate an eating apple into it. Leave to stand until lukewarm, when the custard will have absorbed the flavour of the fruit. Just lovely!

When I went to senior school, they did something they called banana custard, but it was very different. Firstly it was a custard tart - pastry base, set custard, sliced banana. Secondly it was cold. It had its merits, sure, but what would have been good was if the custard had some of the flavour of the banana. So I suggested this to the dinner ladies. One wasn't sure if they could do anything about it, but another one winked and said "We'll see what we can do luv".

They actually did warm the tart up next time it was served, but the flavour of the banana still didn't come through enough. The weather was now warming up, and I resigned myself to not having my treat at school. Next time I had it at school though, there was a bit of a surprise: piped cream on top of the tart. Actually this was an improvement.

I can't say whether they kept experimenting with the dish because at the start of the next school year I started to bring in sandwiches for lunch. I suppose now they might serve Banoffee Pie, but I'd actually quite like to revisit a banana custard tart with the toffee sauce maybe.