STEAK & KIDNEY PIE

For a long while, British food didn’t have the best reputation. Accusations of blandness and overcooking may occasionally have been justified, but some of the criticism of our national cuisine might have been a simple matter of vocabulary. To the uninitiated, the names of dishes such as toad in the hole and spotted dick sound ambiguous at best, and unappealing at worst. Steak and kidney pie, however, is a much more literal proposition. It’s clear at a glance what you’ll find under the pastry lid, and while some offal-avoiders might not be keen on the idea of kidneys, for aficionados, they’re the best part.

Gary Rhodes, the chef who perhaps did more than any other to revive interest in such traditional food, referred to steak and kidney pie as “that most classic of British dishes”, but in fact, it doesn’t seem to have a particularly ancient pedigree. Pies themselves are a different story: as Pete Brown modestly claims in his book, , “Britain does pies better than anyone else