Steak and kidney pudding is a traditional English

main course A main course is the featured or primary dish in a meal consisting of several courses. It usually follows the entrée () course. Usage In the United States and Canada (except Quebec), the main course is traditionally called an "entrée". En ...

in which beef

steak A steak is a cut of meat sliced across muscle fibers, sometimes including a bone. It is normally Grilling, grilled or Pan frying, fried, and can be diced or cooked in sauce. Steaks are most commonly cut from cattle (beefsteak), but can also ...

and beef,

veal Veal is the meat of Calf (animal), calves, in contrast to the beef from older cattle. Veal can be produced from a calf of either sex and any List of cattle breeds, breed; however, most veal comes from young male calves of Dairy cattle, dairy b ...

, pork or lamb

kidney In humans, the kidneys are two reddish-brown bean-shaped blood-filtering organ (anatomy), organs that are a multilobar, multipapillary form of mammalian kidneys, usually without signs of external lobulation. They are located on the left and rig ...

are enclosed in

suet Suet ( ) is the raw, hard fat of beef, lamb or mutton found around the loins and kidneys. Suet has a melting point of between and solidification (or congelation) between . Its high smoke point makes it ideal for deep frying and pastr ...

pastry and slow-

steamed Steaming is a method of cooking using steam. This is often done with a food steamer, a kitchen appliance made specifically to cook food with steam, but food can also be steamed in a wok. In the American Southwest, steam pits used for cooking ha ...

on a stovetop.

History and ingredients

Steak puddings (without kidney) were part of British cuisine by the 18th century.Davidson, p. 754

Hannah Glasse Hannah Glasse (; March 1708 – 1 September 1770) was an English cookery writer of the 18th century. Her first cookery book, ''The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy'', published in 1747, became the best-selling recipe book that century. It wa ...

(1751) gives a recipe for a suet pudding with beef-steak (or

mutton Lamb and mutton, collectively sheep meat (or sheepmeat) is one of the most common meats around the world, taken from the domestic sheep, ''Ovis aries'', and generally divided into lamb, from sheep in their first year, hogget, from sheep in thei ...

). Nearly a century later, Eliza Acton (1846) specifies

rump steak Rump steak is a cut of beef. The rump is the division between the leg and the chine cut right through the aitch bone. It may refer to: * A steak from the top half of an American-cut round steak primal * A British- or Australian-cut steak fro ...

for her "Small beef-steak pudding" made with suet pastry, but, like her predecessor, does not include kidney. An early mention of steak and kidney pudding appears in ''Bell's New Weekly Messenger'' on 11 August 1839: According to the cookery writer Jane Grigson, the first published recipe to include kidney with the steak in a suet pudding was in 1859 in Mrs Beeton's ''

Household Management A household consists of one or more persons who live in the same dwelling. It may be of a single family or another type of person group. The household is the basic unit of analysis in many social, microeconomic and government models, and is impo ...

''.Grigson, p. 243 Beeton had been sent the recipe by a correspondent in

Sussex Sussex (Help:IPA/English, /ˈsʌsɪks/; from the Old English ''Sūþseaxe''; lit. 'South Saxons'; 'Sussex') is an area within South East England that was historically a kingdom of Sussex, kingdom and, later, a Historic counties of England, ...

in south-east England, and Grigson speculates that it was until then a regional dish, unfamiliar to cooks in other parts of Britain. Beeton suggested that the dish could be "very much enriched" by the addition of mushrooms or oysters. In those days, oysters were the cheaper of the two: mushroom cultivation was still in its infancy in Europe and oysters were still commonplace. In the following century,

Dorothy Hartley Dorothy Rosaman Hartley (4 October 1893 – 22 October 1985) was an English social historian, illustrator, and author. Daughter of a clergyman, she studied art, which she later taught. Her interest in history led her into writing. Among her boo ...

(1954) recommended the use of black-gilled mushrooms rather than oysters, because the long cooking is "apt to make ystersgo hard". 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 beef kidney, as does

Marcus Wareing Marcus Wareing (born 29 June 1970) is an English celebrity chef who was Chef-Owner of the one- Michelin-starred restaurant Marcus until its permanent closure in December 2023. Since 2014, Wareing has been a judge on '' MasterChef: The Professiona ...

. Other cooks of modern times have variously specified lamb or sheep kidney ( Marguerite Patten,

Nigella Lawson Nigella Lucy Lawson (born 6 January 1960) is an English food writer and television cook. After graduating from Oxford, Lawson worked as a book reviewer and restaurant critic, later becoming the deputy literary editor of ''The Sunday Times'' in ...

and John Torode), beef kidney ( Mary Berry, Delia Smith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall), veal kidney (

Gordon Ramsay Gordon James Ramsay (; born ) is a British celebrity chef, restaurateur, television presenter, and writer. His restaurant group, List of restaurants owned or operated by Gordon Ramsay, Gordon Ramsay Restaurants, was founded in 1997 and has ...

), either pork or lamb ( Jamie Oliver), and either beef, lamb or veal kidneys ( Gary Rhodes).

Cooking

The traditional method, given in Beeton's recipe, calls for the meat to be put raw into a pastry-lined pudding basin, sealed with a pastry lid, covered with a cloth and steamed in a pan of simmering water for several hours. In Grigson's view, "one gets a better, less sodden crust if the filling is cooked first", and, after Hartley's, all the recipes from recent years mentioned above follow suit. In a 2012 article "How to cook the perfect steak and kidney pudding", Felicity Cloake identified one relatively modern recipe, by Constance Spry, that calls for the meat to go in raw, but found that it "comes out gloopy with flour, and tough as a Victorian boarding school".Cloake, Felicity
"How to cook the perfect steak and kidney pudding"
, ''The Guardian'', 1 March 2012 In addition to the steak and kidney, the filling typically contains carrots and onions, and is pre-cooked in one or more of beef stock, red wine and

stout Stout is a type of dark beer that is generally warm fermented, such as dry stout, oatmeal stout, milk stout and imperial stout. Stout is a type of ale. The first known use of the word "stout" for beer is in a document dated 1677 in the E ...

Nicknames

According to the '' Oxford Companion to Food'',

cockney Cockney is a dialect of the English language, mainly spoken in London and its environs, particularly by Londoners with working-class and lower middle class roots. The term ''Cockney'' is also used as a demonym for a person from the East End, ...

s call steak and kidney pudding "Kate and Sydney Pud". In the slang of the

British Armed Forces The British Armed Forces are the unified military, military forces responsible for the defence of the United Kingdom, its British Overseas Territories, Overseas Territories and the Crown Dependencies. They also promote the UK's wider interests ...

and some parts of

North West England North West England is one of nine official regions of England and consists of the ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside. The North West had a population of 7,4 ...

, the puddings are called "babbies' heads".Seal and Blake, p. 6

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

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External links

Steak and kidney pudding
recipe at bbc.co.uk {{English cuisine English beef dishes British puddings English cuisine Savory puddings Steamed foods Food combinations