Meatball-Mushroom Pie: or, Some things are too good to care how they look

I can't argue with a single thing that goes in this recipe.

Meatball-Mushroom Pie 1 pound ground beef (as lean as possible) ½ teaspoon salt Black pepper to taste 2-4 tbsp cooking oil 1 medium onion, diced 6 tablespoons flour 1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced up to 3 cups cold water Salt and pepper Biscuit dough (recipe follows) Heat oven to 325°. Make the biscuit dough. Cover it to prevent it drying out (setting a dinner plate on top of the mixing bowl will be good enough), and set it aside. Mix beef with salt and pepper. Form it into small balls. Heat oil in a frying pan (or ovenproof skillet) over medium-high heat. Add the meatballs and toss around in the frying pan until lightly browned and partially cooked. You may need to brown the meatballs into multiple batches. Remove the meatballs from the pan. Add the mushrooms and onion. Season with salt and pepper to taste and cook until done, about ten minutes. Stir in the flour, quickly beating out any lumps. Then gradually add the water until you have a thick gravy (you may not use it all). Taste it, and add more salt and pepper if needed. Remove most of the gravy to a small saucepan, leaving enough to generously coat the mushrooms and onions. This is easier if you pour it by the ladle-full through a strainer or slotted spoon, and then tip whatever it catches back into the frying pan. Return the meatballs to the frying pan and stir well. Add more gravy if needed. If your frying pan is not oven-safe, pour its contents into a baking dish which you have coated with cooking spray. Roll the biscuit dough out to fit the pan. Lay it over the pie. Cut some holes for venting. Bake about 40 minutes, or until golden on top.     Biscuits 1½ cups flour 1 tbsp sugar 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¼ cup shortening (or beef fat) ⅓ cup milk 1 egg Mix the dry ingredients together. Cut in the beef fat (or shortening) like a pie crust. Add the milk and egg. Knead 12 times. Set aside until the pie is ready for it. To make biscuits (instead of using the dough as the top crust for this pie), heat oven to 425°. Roll the dough out until it's a half-inch thick. Cut into circles of desired size, and lay on a greased baking sheet. Brush the tops with milk. Bake 10-15 minutes, or until golden. Mrs. J M Donahue; 7049 Greenwood Avenue, Stonehurst Hills, Delaware County, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11 Biscuit dough adapted from Pillsbury's Meat Cook Book, 1970 via Mid-Century Menu on the Wayback Machine

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; January 10, 1936; page 11

It's hardly news that nowadays, beef is a priced like a premeditated splurge instead of something you toss into the grocery cart next to the frozen spinach and the Windex. When I flip through older cookbooks (which I sometimes read instead of novels), I am amazed at how much beef people used to put into their food every day.

With that in mind, I saw these magazines at an antique store recently.

I am tempted to say that the magazine cover proves prove that some things never change. But I did some research (by which I mean I talked to my parents) and learned that apparently beef was very cheap until the prices shot up in the 1970s. (Note that the magazine is dated April 1972, just in time for the beginning of grilling season.) My mother said that before then, they used to grill T-bone steaks as casually as I grill pork chops.

So if we were making today's recipe when it was first printed, it would have been a lot more economical than it is now. And so, let's get to our starring ingredient!

This is the reason I haven't made this recipe before.

The recipe says to form the meat "into small balls." With that in mind, I decided to scoop out the meat by the tablespoon. In short order, we had a plate of salted and peppered balls of extravagance.

Because we at A Book of Cookrye are always economizing, I did not put our meatballs into a pan coated with cooking oil. Instead, I cooked them in beef fat. As I have mentioned, the rising price of beef has led me to obsessively save everything I drain from the frying pan. The beef fat in today's recipe represented 20% of the purchase price, and I refuse to send grocery money to the city dump. (Also, it turns out we're nearly out of oil.)

Cheapskatery aside, beef fat seems more period-correct than oil. Yes, cooking oil existed back then. But based on the recipes I've seen, people didn't start their dinners with a splash of oil in a hot frying pan until well after the Depression was over. Maybe people in those days also obsessively saved every cent of grocery money that they drained out of various meat-laden skillets.

Having melted the fat, Mrs. Donahue tells us to "lightly brown" the meatballs. Here I should note that I never make meatballs on the stovetop, instead favoring the more foolproof method of putting them in the oven to mind their own business. This picture shows why.

Pushing meatballs around a frying pan is a skill, and I do not have it. Fortunately, I didn't have to completely cook them at this stage. (I'm assuming "lightly browned" means halfway cooked.) 

Having made an embarrassment of the beef, it was time to remove it from the pan and fail to convince myself that things would get better before the end of the recipe.

 

The plate of half-cooked, malformed meatballs would prove the aesthetic low point of this endeavor. But although things got better from here onward, the pie never turned into a visual masterpiece. 

In case you forgot there was a Depression on when this recipe came out, Mrs. Donahue uses a mountain of mushrooms and onions to stretch a single pound of beef into dinner for five. Granted, her recipe calls for canned mushrooms instead of fresh. But I added about the same amount of mushrooms by weight.

I thought the skillet might prove inadequate, but the mushrooms shrank as they cooked. After a few minutes, I dared to hope that the meatballs might actually fit in the pan. 

At this point, Mrs. Donahue's directions got a bit confusing. The part where we add flour and then water to make a gravy was straightforward enough. But one sentence after telling us to make a gravy with the mushrooms in the pan, she seems to tell us to skim off the excess gravy and then return the mushrooms to the pan. 

I had to reread the recipe several times before I realized I'm supposed to transfer everything from the frying pan to a baking dish. In theory, I'd scoop everything out with a slotted spoon, and then add just enough of the gravy to hold all together. The remaining gravy should stay in the frying pan until serving time, at which point everyone gets to spoon it over their pie.

However, we at A Book of Cookrye really like a single-pan recipe, so Mrs. Donahue's instructions got tactfully ignored.

After adding the flour to everything in the pan, our mushrooms and onions got a lot less photogenic. I'm not very good at flour-lump prevention. But even a perfectly smooth gravy wouldn't have prevented this from looking like dog food.

Mrs. Donahue has us adding three cups of water (that's 7-ish deciliters for our metric friends), which seemed a bit excessive to me. I was almost certain that adding nearly a quart of water would turn our gravy into a runny failure. Therefore, I went with the well-used method of gradually adding water until everything looked right. As expected, we used a lot less than Mrs. Donahue ordered.

And so, it was finally time for our meatballs to get back into the pool.

I had to look up Mrs. Donahue's address. Did she live in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country? Because this seemed perfect for feeding hungry miners. 

Well, you probably aren't surprised to find out that a town with a well-heeled name like "Stonehurst Hills" isn't near any mines. There isn't even a local steel mill. Instead, it's only a short streetcar ride away from Philadelphia.

Don't you hate when dinner looks like someone already vomited it back up?

Mrs. Donahue says to cover the pie with a "rich biscuit dough," but doesn't give a recipe for that. To be fair, this pie came from the newspaper. Printing a biscuit recipe under the main instructions would have used up precious column-inches and crowded other people out of the Recipe Exchange. Also, anyone who hadn't skipped home economics class probably didn't need directions to make biscuits.

I used the biscuit recipe that came from the disastrous cherry-ham cobbler. In keeping with the bovine theme of the recipe, I made the biscuit dough with beef fat. We have already learned that beef fat makes better biscuits than shortening. I then tried to tell myself that the mushrooms under the beefy bread count as a serving of vegetables.

As I laid the dough over the simmering mess in the pan, I thought to myself that canned biscuits might have been an ideal way to reduce the time and bowls that this recipe demands. I then considered that perhaps twenty years after Mrs. Donahue's recipe got printed in the newspaper, she might have modernized it by using canned cream of mushroom soup and canned bread dough.

Setting aside canned foods and returning to the pie at hand, I tried to make a decorative design with the excess dough trimmings. I don't think I succeeded.

Mrs. Donahue has us baking this pie at 425° for "about 40" minutes. I didn't know whether to believe her or not. On the one hand, that seemed like we'd burn the pie. On the other hand, we had a lot of raw beef under the rich biscuit dough. 

I cautiously trusted Mrs. Donahue's baking instructions, but I set the timer to go off ten minutes early anyway. I should have returned to the kitchen earlier still. Fifteen minutes after going into the oven, the pie was offensively well-done.

I should have seen this coming. A lot of our recipes from the Recipe Exchange never quite work as written. Indeed, this isn't even the first time the Recipe Exchange gave us a ruinously high baking temperature. 

Fortunately, only the top of the pie was overcooked. The biscuit dough underneath the half-burnt crust had turned into perfect bread. And the oven didn't harm the meatballs underneath.

I rarely write about the leftovers, but I have to note that while this pie could at best be called "homely" when fresh from the oven, it looked like pig slop when transferred to a storage container.

But the pie was too delicious to care how unsightly it looked. There are some leftovers that you only eat because you know how much grocery money went into making them. This pie was so good that I put the leftovers on the bottom refrigerator shelf and pushed them all the way back so no one thought to look for them.

Because I liked the pie so much, I made it again as soon as the grocery budget permitted. This time, I did a much better job of mixing in the flour without any lumps. Practice may not make perfect, but it makes a successful mushroom mud.

Emboldened by our improvement, I decided to dump the all three cups of water that the recipe demands into the pot all at once. After all, the flour was completely and thoroughly mixed in, which meant it would theoretically have better thickening powers than it did last time. And while that may have been true, we ended up with mushrooms floating in cloudy water. Our "gravy" tasted as diluted as it looked.

On the bright side, we had enough gravy to pour on top of the pie as well as bake in it. Things were going as the recipe intended. 

Incidentally, you can tell that this recipe comes from a time when money was tight. Instead of using up more grocery money making sauce to pour on top of the pie, we are directed to take it out of the pie itself.

I added more seasonings to the, um, "gravy" to make it taste less like water with mushrooms that fell in by accident. Then I added more flour because it was barely thicker than tap water. If this isn't how the recipe's supposed to look, it's got to be pretty darn close.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've ever poured gravy onto biscuits.

This recipe is unapologetically from before the social media era. While more adept hands could have made a prettier pie than I did, Mrs. Donahue clearly didn't care if this pie was good enough for Instagram. I actually like when recipes don't care about being good enough for a Tiktok video. 

Anyway, because I hate posting recipe directions that don't work (and also because I really like this pie), I made it a few weeks later. This time, I gradually added enough water to our befloured mushrooms to make a gravy without ruining it. Since I didn't over-dilute it, the resulting gravy tasted wonderfully of all the mushrooms, beef, and onions that were in it.

I then found a near-instantaneous way of separating out the gravy that is supposed to go on top.

Despite getting the recipe right, the actual pie looks like a dog's dinner before we put a crust on top. But it smelled amazing.

As baking time arrived, I decided to try another possible recipe error. The original directions call for baking the pie at 425° for forty minutes. (For our metric friends, 425°F is a searing 220°C, and forty minutes is 24 hectoseconds.) As previously mentioned, I thought the pie needed such a long and extra-hot baking time to cook the raw beef within. But every time we made it, the pie would be nearly burnt long before forty minutes had elapsed. 

After multiple nearly-burnt pies, I thought that perhaps someone in the Philadelphia Inquirer's typesetting department had accidentally grabbed the wrong number from the type drawer when they got to the baking temperature. (It has happened before.) And so, I reduced the temperature to a more moderate 325° (160° for our Celsius friends).

Our resulting pie was golden and perfect right on schedule. And because it was in the oven for 40 minutes, we knew that the meat was completely cooked by the time it was done.

In closing, this tastes so good. It's hard to argue with beef, onions, and mushrooms, but Mrs. Donahue took a promising group of ingredients and made them even better than expected. This pie is the dinner you want to come home to. I had feared it would be underseasoned and bland, but it came out far better than it needed to. I think that putting the meatballs into the pan while half-raw allowed the mushroom juices to penetrate them as they finished cooking.

However, today's pie involved a lot more mixing bowls most single-pan meals. As another cleanup note, I baked this in a cast-iron skillet so I could do it all in one pan. Unfortunately, the errant splatters of gravy (of which there were many) welded themselves to the iron. Even though I cleaned the pan before it had time to get cold, it was as hard to wash as if I'd let it dry on the countertop for several days. So, you may want to do the stovetop part of this recipe in an ordinary, dishwasher-safe frying pan. You can then transfer the hot mushrooms and meat into a casserole dish that can soak overnight in the sink without rusting.