Craig Silvey summer cookbook recipe: Humble pie
It may be humble in terms of cost, but it is bold, brash, punchy and delectable with a Stroganoffish zest. It will change your life. Humbly.
Every day this summer, we’ll publish a favourite recipe from an Australian author, dishes made with affection for family, friends or someone special.
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My latest novel, Runt, features a dish known as Humble Pie. It is prepared by Susie Shearer, the vibrantly fashionable mother of Annie, our novel’s hero. The Shearers live on a sheep farm in the country town of Upson Downs, and they are doing it tough.
Having a gift for thrift, Susie scours her local supermarket for discounted items. She then weds those ingredients in unholy matrimony and encases them in pastry. The approach is to be admired, but the results are less than palatable.
One such Humble Pie consists of chicken giblets, canned asparagus, kidney beans and brussels sprouts, and has the appearance of ‘a muddy pond of frogs that have vomited themselves inside out’. Problem is, none of the Shearer family have the heart to tell Susie how awful her pies are. If anything, they overcompensate with praise, to the extent that Susie suspects she must be a mercurial talent, which, as you might expect, begets more revoltingly discordant combinations.
I have my own history with the Humble Pie, and just like Susie Shearer, I consider my culinary prowess to be peerless. The important difference is that my cooking has withstood the scrutiny of some remorselessly harsh critics over the years. As a result, honed and polished by the opinions of many ungrateful diners, my Humble Pie is, without exaggeration, the greatest to ever exit an oven.
Of course, I recognise the irony in proclaiming a ‘humble’ pie to be the pinnacle of the form, but its modesty lies with its origins and its constituent parts, not with the shameless self-aggrandising of its creator.
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My Humble Pie is the greatest to exit an oven
It may be humble in terms of cost, but it is bold, brash, punchy and delectable with a Stroganoffish zest. It will change your life. Humbly.
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Summer Cookbook
Australia’s favourite authors share their most meaningful recipes.
I’ll begin my explanation with a piece of unsolicited advice: if you’re going to be a starving artist, learn how to cook. In the early days of my career, I worked a swathe of entry level jobs to pay the rent and fund the time I needed to write. This left me with very little money to purchase food, and so my emphasis was on preparing cheap meals that would last a few days. My favourite of these was a beef pie that elevated affordable ingredients into something morishly delicious, buttressed by my Gran Joy’s Hot Crust Lard Pastry, which is so robustly forgiving and suspiciously simple that you don’t even need opposable thumbs to capably prepare it.
Anyway, please, try my pie. It may be humble in terms of cost, but it is bold, brash, punchy and delectable with a Stroganoffish zest. It will change your life. Humbly.
For Gran Joy’s Hot Crust Lard Pastry:
1 ½ cups plain flour
¾ cup self raising flour
150g lard
75g butter
¾ cup boiling water
1 egg to glaze
For the filling:
1kg beef. Chuck steak fits the brief, however any secondary cut will serve you well. Oyster blade is perfect. Brisket works a charm. Beef cheeks are amazing. Shank, too, if that’s your thing. Anything with plenty of marbling and connective tissue that likes a slow braise. You’re the chief of your beef, go with your heart.
3 heaped tbspn plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups beef or chicken stock
1 fat carrot
2 sticks celery
1 brown onion
4 cloves garlic
2 tbspn Worcestershire Sauce
1 tbspn black pepper
100g tomato paste
1 teaspoon paprika
1 sprig rosemary
1 handful fresh oregano
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 teaspoon Vegemite
1 tbspn French mustard
1 tbspn olive oil
1. Preheat your oven to 150 celsius.
2. Heat a good glug of oil on low-medium in a Dutch oven or casserole dish. Add your finely diced onion, carrot, celery and garlic and sweat the mirepoix until the onion is soft and glassy.
3. Add your herbs and spices. Resist the temptation to add a bay leaf, because bay leaves are a lie. They are largely ceremonial, coasting by on reputation alone, and they ultimately contribute nothing whilst claiming credit that is entirely undeserved. A bit like the Royal Family. I digress.
4. Jack your heat up a bit and add your beef, which you have sliced into chunks no smaller than 1 ½ inches. Brown them off. Add your flour and stir conscientiously. Don’t be too concerned if it goes a bit gluey and sticks to the bottom of the pan. Cook for around a minute, then add your mustard, Worcestershire sauce, tomato paste, and Vegemite. These inclusions are essential, because we are assembling a posse of Beef’s best friends to serve as wingmen, boosting its confidence so that it can be the best beef it can be. Also, don’t be a coward and add less Worcestershire sauce than recommended. That muddy brown liquid is an absolute umami bomb, and it deserves to be heralded as the UK’s greatest contribution to global cuisine. Incorporate with some vigorous wooden spoonery, then stir in your stock, taking care to scrape the fond off the floor of the dish.
5. Cover and braise in the oven for two hours.
Don’t stir it, open it, or touch it, lest ye release the steam spirit responsible for keeping your meat moist and tender.
6. Now it is time for Gran Joy’s Hot Crust Lard Pastry. In a large bowl, pour boiling water over your lard and butter. Whisk until melted and relatively emulsified. Add your flours. Stir. And that’s it. That’s all it is. Cling-wrap and refrigerate. Go on with your life.
7. After two hours, remove the lid from your dish, stir gently, and braise for a further 30 minutes uncovered. If the meat is somehow still slightly tough, don’t panic, just add a touch more stock and cook a little longer.
8. When satisfied, leave it to cool. Remove your chilled pastry, turn it out onto a floured surface, and roll to a half-centimetre thickness. Now that I think about it, you will actually require thumbs for this part, so my apologies to any aspirational chimpanzees who have made it this far.
9. Prepare a pie tin with a layer of butter and flour, and form your base. It’s no problem if small cracks or fissures occur, just fill them with scraps and off-cuts like the dodgy tradesman you are. No need to blind-bake, just spoon in your filling, cover with a pastry lid, crimp the edges with a tuck-and-roll or a fork-press, poke a few air holes, and slide it into your oven at 180 celsius.
10. Smugly, you think I’ve forgotten the egg wash. Well, I haven’t. After 25 minutes, remove and paint the lid with a beaten egg, and return for five minutes, or until golden brown.
11. Take it out. Admire your Humble Pie. Nod slowly and congratulate yourself (and me). Place it on a table and share it with the calibre of people who would earnestly compliment you even if they didn’t like it. But they absolutely, undoubtedly will. I promise. Humbly.
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Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Rhubarb, was published in 2004. His bestselling novel, Jasper Jones, was released in 2009 and is considered a modern Australian classic. Craig‘s third novel Honeybee was published in 2019 and won Best Fiction for the Indie Book Awards 2021 and Dymock’s Book of the Year 2020. His latest novel, Runt, was published in October 2022.
Runt by Craig Silvey, Allen & Unwin