Sarah's Pie

[igenlode]

This pie is always a luxury -- the meat must have cost me about £16 overall, although I only used about a third of what I bought and the rest will go in other meals eventually -- but it was a success when I first made it in my teens and I have continued doing it as an occasional treat ever since. It never fails to succeed; I think the magic ingredient is the black pudding.

According to the recipe for "Sarah's Pie" (from my souvenir book of Northumberland Country Recipes, along with a very successful recipe for leek & bacon pudding) you slowly bake together diced beef, kidney, and bacon/ham in chunks and not slices --coming into possession of this last tends to be my cue to make the pie-- in beef stock, then when the meat is tender you add hard-boiled egg and chunks of black pudding, increase the oven heat while you make some pastry, put the top on the filling and bake the pie for 25 minutes or so in a hot oven. I didn't have any kidney (there simply wasn't any left, so I saved that expense at least!), and added brown flour into my favoured potato pastry recipe for a sumptuously well-flavoured crust. The recipe suggests thickening the stock with cornflour, but I just added a tablespoon of my date-expired 1.5kg bag of oats, which I have now almost entirely finished. (At this point I have almost got used to the dusty flavour they give to the porridge, but in baking they are fine!) In general I find the black pudding and chopped egg tend to thicken the juices quite a lot anyway.

I had a third of the (rather small) pie with turnips, potato (left over from the pastry), swede, and steamed cauliflower leaves, and it was rich, savoury and absolutely delicious; a purely meat pie makes a big difference from the more usual pie fillings/casseroles that I get to eat which are made in the proportion of a few scraps of meat to a vast proportion of vegetables!