Normally on a Thursday evening we sit and talk about meals for the weekend.Recently recipes from the Middle East have dominated and extremely enjoyable these have been.
However a desire for “comfort food” is often strong, especially on a wet cold winters day.
Leafing through Simon Hopkinson’s books “Gammon and Spinach” and his award winning “Roast Chicken and other stories” a recipe for Lancashire Meat pie attracted my attention.
Comfort food at its best, a pie!
200 g lard We rendered our own from pork fat, not quite enough as it happened, but we made up the short fall by adding goose fat from a jar
350g plain flour
salt
6 tablespoon ice cold water
For the filling
600 g stewing steak chopped into small dice (we used the meat sold in France fur beouf bourginon which has some fat and gristle which is important for this pie)
350g finely chopped onion
300g diced potato
sea salt
plenty of white pepper
1 level tablespoon plain flour
200ml water
a little beaten egg and milk
Method
You will need a loose bottomed pastry tin measuring 20 cm x 4 cm, lightly buttered and a flat oven tray. This is put in the oven to heat up, so that the base of then pie will cook evenly through
Make the pastry by dicing the lard adding the flour and salt and rub until it resembles coarse bread crumbs. Quickly add the cold water and need together gently, leave it to rest in the fridge
Preheat oven to 205°C and put the baking tray in.
Put all the ingredients for the filling, except the water and egg, into a bowl and mix well with your hands.
Divide the pastry into two (2/3 and 1/3) , roll out the larger one into a circle, it does not need to be too thin, and line the tin. Leave the over lap. Pile the filling in right to the top, it will all go in – ours was like a small mountain! Carefully pour in the water.
Roll out the lid. Brush the over hang with water and put the lid on, press together, and trim off.
Bush the top with the egg wash, decorate if you wish and press down again. Make two generous incisions in the centre and place in the oven.
Cook for 25 minutes. Now turn the temperature down to 160°C and bake for a further hour and a half, in fact we cooked it for 2 hours more. Check from time to time that the top is not browning too much. Cover it with foil if necessary .
What makes this pie so special is a long slow cooking with all the elements cooking as one.
The pastry is sublime!
To be truly authentic eat with a splash of malt vinegar (sounds strange, but it really works) and some piccalilli or ketchup. We served mushy peas and the vinegar.
Original Recipe from Simon Hopkinson
This is meat and potato pie
Has anyone got a recipe for meat pies
Pickled red cabbage is what you want
In Lancashire it’s often served with pickled red cabbage… oddly enough it is a traditional dish served at funerals… when the the wake takes place in a working man’s club… We had it for both my parents’ funerals…