Cut some ordinary beef-steak, fillet-steak, or rump-steak into pieces about an inch thick, an inch wide, and three inches long. Take a frying-pan, and place in it a small piece of fat or butter. Make this very hot, and quickly brown the outside of these pieces of meat without cooking them. In order to do this, you must get the frying-pan very hot indeed, and only have very little fat or butter in it. Each piece of meat should be brown outside in a few seconds, while it is blue in the middle. Place these pieces of meat in a pie-dish. Have ready a little No. 3 Stock, and pour into the frying-pan about sufficient to make enough gravy to cover the meat in the pie. After frying the meat, some dried-up gravy will be left in the frying-pan, very much like extract of meat, which should not be wasted; therefore stir up the stock in the frying-pan, scraping it with a spoon. Pour this gravy over the meat in the pie-dish. Add, for an ordinary-sized pie-dish, that will take a couple of pounds of steak, a piece of onion, chopped fine, the size of the top of thumb down to the end of the nail, a teaspoonful of salt, and another teaspoonful of black pepper (a meat pie requires a great deal of pepper), also about a teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Cover with an ordinary or puff paste, and bake in the oven for about an hour and a half.

N.B. - In covering with paste (see Paste) act as follows: - Roll out a thin strip of paste, an eighth of an inch in thickness, and cover the rim of the pie-dish from the outside edge to about a quarter of an inch down the dish, greasing the dish with a little butter where the strip will go. Moisten the surface of this rim with a little water. Next, cover the pie over with some paste, rolled out about a quarter of an inch thick, piling up the meat in the centre to support the crust. Press the crust round gently on to the other rim, and then cut round with a knife outside the edge, keeping the knife perfectly upright or perpendicular as you cut, thus trimming the two pieces of paste neatly together. Next, crimp the edge with an ordinary fork, using the tips of the fork - about a quarter of an inch of them - for the purpose; but, in doing this, do not push away the paste from the edge of the dish. Make an opening in the top of the paste - i.e., the top of the pie - with a knife, so that the steam can escape in baking. The paste can be glazed with a yolk of egg. (See Glaze).

Every kind of ordinary meat-pie is made on the above principle. The pie can be improved as follows: - One or two sheep's kidneys can be added, after being cut into quarters, and browned with the meat. One or two eggs may be boiled hard, cut into slices, and added to the pie. A few oysters, with their liquor, are a very great improvement; so are a few mushrooms.

If you do not brown the meat, but put it in raw, the pie will have a " boiled meat " look about it. If it has not, it will probably be because you had not sufficient gravy, and the meat has been baked dry and black in the dish, because it was not covered over.

Water can, of course, be added instead of stock, but the gravy will not be so good.

If you want a meat-pie cold for lunch, or for a picnic, dissolve sufficient gelatine in the gravy to ensure its being a jelly when cold. (See Jelly.) Also fill the pie quite full, after it has cooked, through the opening in the top, with gravy just on the point of setting.