For Chris the butcher: steak and kidney pie.

Chris is a local butcher -- one of very few. So here is a recipe made with things I have just bought from him, with his recommended amounts -- judged by eye, you understand. I bought stewing steak and -- the proper stuff, as he says--  ox kidney for this. I may sound as though I eat a lot meat. I probably eat red meat at most once a week and usually chicken once or twice a week. When I do eat red meat, it needs to pack a punch. This pie does because it's solid and speaks of home and, when it's in the oven, the house smells wonderful. I must confess that my young children were not overly keen on the ox kidney, but did justice to the rest of the pie. And here it is, still warm.

A note of pastry. I think the stuff you can buy ready made is pretty good, but what I generally do is buy puff and filo pastry and make everything else.

Steak and kidney pie. Four 4 with possibly a few seconds. To serve with potatoes -- which could be new ones, now-- and some greens. This time of year, make it a British brassica.

500 g puff pastry, defrosted if frozen and rolled out to about 1cm thickness
1 egg for glazing the pie before it goes in the oven
3 large carrots, roughly chopped. Not traditional, but I like them
1 large onion, chopped into rings
1 wineglass of red wine. I happened to have some recently opened Cabernet Sauvignon
1 bay leaf, if you like
plain flour to hand
500g stewing steak
250g ox kidney, sliced or cut into cubes: generous ones; not dolly mixture size


First sweat the onion in a little sunflower oil in a large pan until the onion  is golden. Take it out and put it to one side. Now, brown all the meat. You may want to do this in a couple of batches, because you want it to seal and brown, not steam. Just brown it and let it catch here and there. Then add the onion to the pan, mixing well, plus the carrots cut into smallish chunks. Sprinkle on a tablespoon of plain flour and mix well. Then, pour on the wine plus enough water --or beef stock or vegetable stock if you have it-- and raise the heat until the liquid thickens. Cook gently for five minutes, then into your dish it goes. The choice of dish is up to you, of course. Today, I cooked this in a oven dish 15cm by 30cm. It might look jollier in a big round dish, perhaps?

Put your pastry on the top, allowing for shrinkage, so draping it over the edge and crimping it firmly against the dish. Neatness is not the name of the game here. I think it should look quite roughly done. Now, if you wanted, you could raise the centre with a little pie funnel or maybe an egg cup, but I don't mind if it sinks a bit, so I didn't bother, just cut a couple of slits in the middle of the pie, as was my mother's wont, and brushed it with beaten egg. Cook it it a hot oven --at 200, then, for 40-45 minutes, by which time, the meat should be tender and the pastry golden. If you want your stewing steak so soft that you could cut it with a spoon, cook it for longer before it goes into the pie dish, but add the kidneys just for the last few minutes because you don't want to overdo them.

And here are some tins I mentioned in some of my much earlier blog posts and in my book. These are tins from my paternal grandmother's kitchen. She might have added the contents of either to the gravy for such a pie. Later, they came to house shoe tacks and small nails. Now, they sit -- still full of shoe tacks: in his spare time, my grandfather used to mend people's shoes in his Mendip village-- in an alcove on our stairs.

As a postscript: I should say that my grandmother would have baulked at the use of puff pastry and not suet and as for the wine. Well...