Steak and kidney pie

Steak and kidney pie is a popular British dish. It is a savoury pie filled principally with a mixture of diced beef, diced kidney and onion. Its contents are generally similar to those of steak and kidney puddings. 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.[n 1] 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:

Source: Wikipedia