Steak and kidney pie is a popular British dish. It is a savoury pie filled principally with a mixture of diced beef, diced kidney (which may be beef, lamb, veal, or pork) and onion. Its contents are generally similar to those of steak and kidney puddings. History and ingredients In modern times the fillings of steak and kidney pies and steak and kidney puddings are generally identical, but until the mid-19th century the norms were steak puddings and kidney pies. Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 1826, records a large dish of kidney pies in the window of a baker near Smithfield, and ten years later a kidney-pie stand outside what is now the Old Vic, emitting sparks every time the vendor opened his portable oven to hand a hot kidney pie to a customer. "Rump Steak and Kidney Pie" was served in a Liverpool restaurant in 1847, and in 1863 a Birmingham establishment offered "Beef Steak and Kidney Pie". But until the 1870s kidney pies are far more frequently mentioned in the newspapers, including one thrown at a policeman during an affray in Knightsbridge in 1862, and an assault case in Lambeth in 1867 when a customer attacked a waitress for bringing her a beef pie instead of a kidney one. By the mid-1870s steak and kidney pies were as often mentioned as kidney ones. Both appeared in verse of the period: You say you are too sad to eat! Just hand your plate and try This steak and kidney pie, my love– This steak and kidney pie. From Fun, 1875 I've eaten as much as a man could eat, I've gone through a very remarkable feat; From the twopenny tart to the kidney pie, I've swallowed as much as I could, have I. From The Zoo (1875), by B. C. Stephenson and Arthur Sullivan According to the cookery writer Jane Grigson, the first published recipe for the combination of steak and kidney was in 1859 in Mrs Beeton's Household Management. Beeton used it in a pudding rather than a pie. She had been sent the recipe by a correspondent in Sussex 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 steak and kidney could be "very much enriched" by the addition of mushrooms or oysters. In those days oysters were the