Matthew Fort goes to Devon to meet a man who is well-schooled in French cuisine but likes nothing better than turning his hand to one of
Michael Bastard was doing a little light pruning when I spoke to him on his mobile phone.
"I'm in Burgundy," he said. "Meursault, to be exact. I'm helping out a friend with la
taille."
"With what?"
"Pruning the vines. It's hard work. But I get to drink some wonderful wines."
Steak and kidney pie seems a bit ordinary after that. Nevertheless, upon his return to the UK, Michael
takes time out to cook me one. He lives with his wife, Gena, and their dogs, Tootsie and Pom, in a
converted barn in Yealmpton, ten miles from Plymouth. The house is tucked in the fold of a hill. A line of beech trees grows along its crest, and fields with trimmed hedges and thick woods roll away
down to the bright, tumbling waters of the River Yealm. This is farming country: green, verdant
and rolling. Michael himself farms 600 acres.
There's been a Bastard in these parts ever since William the Conqueror. One Robert Bastard gets a
mention in the Domesday Book as owning nine manors. William Bastard was Recorder for Totnes and MP
for Dartmouth in the reign of King James I. In 1805, another ancestor, Sarah Catherine Martin,
wrote the
much-loved children's book, The Comic Adventures of Mother Hubbard & Her Dog.
Michael welcomes me into his home, apologising for the state of the kitchen. In truth, it is not a
gleaming, state-of-the-art kitchen. Rather, it is hallowed by use, warmed by domesticity, a bit
scuffed around the edges: a working room.
"This is a rather personal interpretation of steak and kidney pie," he says, as he slices through
the beautiful burgundy of the braising steak. "I thought about adding carrot, but decided against
it. But I do add garlic, which I think fills out the flavour, and mushrooms for texture as well as
flavour. And I'll be using port to help make the gravy." He picks up a bottle and waves it around.
"I suppose it should be beer, but port will bring richness and sweetness. Sweetness, savoury and
salt is a very medieval combination. Besides, I think we can justify it because port is such a
traditionally English drink."
Such ease with the traditions of British cookery seems at odds from a man who decided to improve
his French some years ago by spending a few months working in the kitchen of a restaurant in Burgundy,
Les Gourmets in Dijon, under the genial guidance of chef-pâtron,
Joël Perreaut. Michael has since done stints in several other notable French restaurants,
all in the pursuit of linguistic prowess, although he's picked up a good deal of culinary expertise
along the way.
The kitchen fills with the fat sizzle and rich smells of browned meat. The onions are rolled over
and over in the frying pan, gradually picking up colour and softness. Gena patiently trims and
peels the mushrooms. She and Michael cook easily side by side. She is the pudding cook, she says,
and he tends to do the rest. They work together with good humour, tolerance and co-operation.
Michael inspects her mushrooms. "I won't add them or the kidneys till later," he says. "I want
them to keep their shape and texture." So the meat, onions and garlic are tipped into a casserole.
Michael ties up a sprig or two of thyme
and a bay leaf from the garden inside a strip of leek, and tucks it away. The
satisfying glug of port follows, as does the remains of a bottle of white wine. The casserole is
placed over a low flame to allow the meat to cook gently.
This will take a while, so the conversation, inevitably, comes back to food. Although he didn't
come to cooking until he was in his forties, Michael grew up with good food at home. He is passionate
about the quality of ingredients, about treating them with understanding and respect. He's equally
fervent about his dislikes: fusion food, tinned tuna, brains, tripe, rice puddings, suet crust,
many of which are the legacy, he says, of the disgusting food he had at school.
Returning to the job in hand, Michael starts making a puff pastry for the crust, although Gena
takes over halfway through, bringing her superior pastry skills to bear. In a trice, she has a
textbook block of pastry ready to be rolled out. Then she trims off an edge, rolls it out and
slices it into strips to place along the edges of the pie dish to ensure a proper seal between
pastry and dish.
Now the beef is ready for the final stages. Michael tips it - mushrooms, onions, gravy and all -
into a Pyrex dish. The sealing layer of pastry is carefully worked around the edges, the crust is
laid on top, the edge expertly crimped and brushed with beaten egg, and the whole slipped into
the oven.
Forty minutes later, the moment has arrived. The crust is a glorious, wheaten gold. A knife
slides in and a puff of heady, meaty steam rises out. The gravy clings to the chunks of meat
before oozing out across the plate. The meat divides at pressure from a fork. There's something
utterly British in the way that individual flavours have been reconciled through the cooking
process.
"I love the harmoniousness of this dish," says Michael. And he's right. It's complete, whole,
the perfect balance of flavour and texture. If it needs anything at all to set it off nicely,
it is nothing more than a light and unpretentious red wine. From Meursault, say. Michael, it
seems, may have just the thing…
Steak & Kidney Pie - The History
The big debate is whether pie or pudding is the supreme expression of the steak and kidney
union, and the advocates of each are every bit as set in their opinions as the schools of philosophy
in ancient Athens. Of course, they belong to two quite separate traditions.
- The pudding came first. This was because
the suet for the crust was made with fat from around the veal kidney. Having divested the
kidney of its fat, it must have seemed sensible to throw in the offal itself. This was well-established
by the middle of the 18th century.
- The steak and kidney pie is a relatively recent invention by comparison, though the tradition
of hot pies is an ancient one. In the 15th century, the hawking of hot pies was common, the cries
of hot-pie salesmen being a feature of London street life in particular.
- However, according to Traditional Foods Of Britain, by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown,
the "precise combination of steak and kidney… does not seem to be mentioned until early in the
1900s [although] there were beef pies."
- Indeed, in1884 the beef pie is cited in that classic of French decadent literature, A Rebours
by J-K Huysmans. Des Esseintes, Huysmans' hero, noted "hearty English women … making violent assaults
on a beef steak pie", which contained hot meat cooked in mushroom sauce under a crust.
- Kidneys came late to the frame, and started being added in the 1900s, it seems, partly to bulk
out the more pricey beef and partly to add oomph to the flavour and variety to the texture.
- Incidentally, the tradition of hot pies still survives in the north of England, particularly
around Wigan, whose inhabitants are referred to as "pie eaters" by the folk of nearby St Helens.