[2][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,[4] 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.

From Fun, 1875[10] 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[11] 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.

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.

[1] In addition to the steak and kidney, the filling typically contains carrots and onions, and is cooked in one or more of beef stock, red wine and stout.

In the West Country clotted or double cream may be poured into the pie through a hole in the pastry topping just before serving.

[27] A substantial part of the plot of P. G. Wodehouse's 1963 comic novel Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves hinges on the disruptive allure of a magnificent steak and kidney pie for a young man whose fiancée has decreed that he must turn vegetarian.