This month, we are heating up an English classic. But should it be served with chips or mash? Under a lid or in a pastry casing? And where does veg fit in?
Is it possible to see a country through the prism of a pie? To detect a flavour of the nation in a steak and kidney filling? Obviously, How to Eat – the series that identifies how best to eat our favourite dishes – does not think so. A steak and kidney pie is just a pie. But is it?
Invariably hailed as an English classic, as if our fondness for steak and kidney in rich gravy stops hard at the Welsh or Scottish borders, it is clearly a bakery product with chauvinistic baggage. If that pushy ownership implies an inferiority complex on the part of the English, it is borne out by the insecure language used to celebrate this icon.