Why Hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man is frantically hunting for a cookbook to justify semi-slothful family fun. I’m your Harried Hunter, Jon O’Guin, and man, have I backed myself into a corner for this one. For everyone just here to eat and be merry post-President’s Day, here’s a link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Should Have Taken a Holiday

So, for context: this is, of course, President’s Day weekend. (I say “of course” for you reading this now, but who knows when someone’s going to read this.) Or, rather, right AFTER President’s Day weekend,. Meaning that it was theoretically a three-day weekend for my brother, Nathan, and my mother. I say “Theoretically” because my mother has actually adopted a schedule where she gets every second Friday off, meaning any time there’s a three-day weekend, she either gets two in a row, or it’s actually a 4 day weekend for her, as it is this week. Because of this, my family arranged to have several outings this weekend, as Nate will soon have to leave town for a while to get some job training for his new gig, so before he goes, we wanted to make sure he hit all his favorite spots.

EVERYBODY!
SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS, OAT MILK COCOA, CIDER COCKTAIL
What? My bougie nature is a matter of record.

As such, I brought up that, with all this travel, what should I try to cook this weekend, and the general consensus was “we’d love it if you didn’t.” Which I acknowledged I could do, because I do have a couple recipes pre-cooked, and never written up. So I glanced at the list: Vegan breakfast scramble? Not super President’s Day. Korean jjimbak? Also not a great help. Hudson Bay Bread? Closer…but the Hudson Bay company and all that history is technically rooted in Canada. That left me with my last recipe…which created a problem…and an opportunity.

See, this is one of the pies I made for the final Season of Game of Thrones, which I made with a simple premise: the season would start, we’d do a post about two pork pies, it would end, and we’d do a post about Beef and Bacon Pie. But, as you may recall, the last season of Game of Thrones crashed and burned harder than the only time I’ve been asked to do stand-up, and Nate and I were already a season behind, so I went deeper into unpacking how Cozy mysteries work, and then moved on to street food and horchata.

Weirdly , that “cozy” turned up next to my bed recently, so maybe it’s seeking revenge.

And that’s something of a problem, because I no longer know where the cookbook I used for that recipe is. After all, it’s not like that last season inspired people to have annual re-watches of the show. And that’s where the opportunity comes in: the legacy of the show. Because this is President’s Day, a day for acknowledging the Legacy of…at Least George Washington, and sometimes other people, depending on what state you live in. And who could have a better legacy than Beef Pie, the Broken? Come, let us discuss.

A Lasting Legacy of Lies

A bold and controversial opening, Title Jon. Bit strong for how late we’re starting this project, but go off, King, as the kids say. Anyway, I think it’s not too bold of a statement to make that, to many, Game of Thrones shattered (at least for now) its legacy. The last seasons struggled so much with pacing and pay-off that it has, for many fans, killed their enjoyment of the show as a whole.

Pacing, plot issues, LIGHTING, in one famous episode.

There are more shows on the horizon, however, and the book series may one day resolve the story to people’s enjoyment, which could even have a redemptive effect on the show: the same twists and choices that alienated audiences back then, given enough space in the novels, could give people the energy to look at the show and say “okay, if I squint, I can see what you were TRYING to do”.  A feeling I know quite well, as a fan of the Wheel of Time books who just recently watched the first season of that show end, and went “well, I mean, COVID screwed up your last few episodes, and you had a lead actor quit, so I can understand how we went from (IMO) a constant build in quality from episode 1 to episode 5, for it to suddenly wobble in episode 6, and kind of crash and burn by episode 8.”

The episode 7 opener was strong enough to quell those concerns for a moment, but alas, it could not hold up two whole episodes.

Interestingly, however, I don’t want to focus on the painful truths of legacy…Or, I guess I kind of do. Because this is also President’s Day, a day when, traditionally, we discuss the legacies of…some number of presidents. Check out last year’s post about it, but in MY state, we talk about Washington and Lincoln today. And if there are two Presidents more applauded in our nation’s history, I would like to know of them. Not even four-term winner FDR is as popular, despite being elected twice as much as either of them.

And they do possess great legacies. Washington, as we touched on just two weeks ago, was seen as the Cincinnatus of his day. He was renowned for his abhorrence of power, and, if you have not heard the story, once quelled a potential rebellion of the army by reading them a letter from Congress, which he needed to produce, never seen by the officers before, glasses to read, as he had recently turned 50, and his sight was not what it once was. This display of frailty shook the assembled officers, moving several to tears, as they were forced to confront the reality that Washington had spent 8 years as General, fighting for them month after month. Congress may have slow in paying them, but their loyalty to Washington reminded them that the nation stood for something better. George Washington was seen as remarkable and unifying even in his era: famed enemies Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton both pleaded with him to run for a second term that Washington did not want, on the grounds that only Washington possessed the character and personality to keep the peace between the two rival parties that the two figuratively led.

He often had to intervene in their contentious rap battles, as re-enacted in the documentary “Hamilton”.

 And if Washington was the rock that held our nation together, the foundation stone of our country, then to so many Lincoln stands tall as how high we can reach on that footing. “The Great Emancipator”, who held our nation through Civil War, whose skills as an orator, through his address at Gettysburg, and his second inaugural address, and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates have long been applauded. The Republican party, right now, still proclaims itself “The Party of Lincoln”. His face is blazoned on our humblest of coinage.

But is it the great illusion of edifices such as these that they are unconquerable. The Colossus bestrode Rhodes once, but its structure was unsound, and it cracked and collapsed. In just the same, as we recognize the legacies of Washington and Lincoln, we must reckon with the cracks in the great edifices of their legacies. George Washington was, for his era, maybe a man most aligned with the internal division within the nation in regards to both Native Americans and Slavery: a slave-owner from a young age, Washington, according to historians, began to truly reckon with the villainy of the institution during the revolution. But even then, his efforts to address it were messy, and his attitudes…often jarringly off-key to a modern audience. He complained once that, constantly consumed with work as he kept himself, he felt an injustice that people should view the labor of his slaves as worse, since they did not keep the same long hours he did. In his will, he mandated that the 120+ slaves he owned should be freed following his wife Martha’s death, or at her pleasure. Which sounds a lot better than it was, since his estate had 260+ slaves, the other 140 technically belonging to the family of Martha’s deceased first husband. Meaning that he freed all of his slaves…but in many cases, did not free their spouses, or children, or parents, depending on how the two groups had interacted in the decades they had lived and worked at the same place. Washington felt that the white settler’s hunger for more lands would need a Chinese wall or line of troops to stop them from seizing Native land inappropriately…but he also felt that if the Natives would not sell their land for a fair price, and adopt the agricultural lifestyle of colonial America, they should be extirpated, a word whose translation was last notably used by famed moral philosopher and paragon Walder Frey in season 8 of Game of Thrones: “ripped out, root and stem”.

“Agreeing with Walder Frey” is, in all continuities, understood to be putting oneself in a position of moral jeopardy.
And you thought the Game of Thrones example was spent.

Lincoln freed the slaves, certainly, but he did so under great duress, and openly advocated AGAINST racial equality. The famed Lincoln Douglas debates I just mentioned include an extensive segment where Lincoln holds forth that while he seeks to end slavery in time, he does intend to leave society such that Whites are superior. He does not wish there to be Black voters, or Black jurors. He wishes to maintain laws against interracial marriage. Indeed, he does an extended joke about the fact that he thinks it’s weird that his opponent thinks we have to keep Black people slaves or we’ll all start marrying them, and specifically calls out that Douglas is friends with a man who had a mixed-race common-law wife, and legally recognized his children with her.

This is not to diminish the honor we hold these men with. Lincoln advocated against racial equality, but became close friends with Frederick Douglass, a Black man, and one of the causes of his assassination by John Wilkes Booth was an endorsement, by Lincoln, of the newly re-formed state government of Louisiana, which had empowered itself, in its new constitution, to provide economic liberty for freedmen, to establish public schools for the betterment of the Black community, and, in time, to potentially enfranchise them (give them the right to vote). Lincoln directly argued in his speech that maybe some of us (referring to more ‘radical’ Republicans of the time, who sought full voting franchise for the Black community) could want more, but aren’t we more likely to GET more by accepting this new government of Louisiana, letting them re-establish their relationship as a member of the United States, (get a semi-crucial extra vote to endorse the 13th Amendment, which they’ve already promised to do) and work on the “full franchise” element later? And even his enemies agreed with him: John Wilkes Booth’s DIRECT complaint, the motivating animus of his anger at the speech, that drove him to KILL A PRESIDENT, was “this will mean [N-word] citizenship. That’s the last speech he’ll ever give.”

Weirdly, we are forced into the position of “agreeing with John Wilkes Booth” for those statements. It DID lead to Black citizenship, and it WAS the last speech Lincoln ever gave. Thanks, you know, to Booth.

 Washington, as noted, had grown up with slaves, and his wealth and finances were dependent on slavery, and still he TRIED to make changes. Lincoln was, by some interpretations, a white supremacist, but he still felt that meant we had to treat our Black community BETTER. I referenced the Colossus of Rhodes earlier: an often forgotten fact is that while it only STOOD for around 54 years, it LAID for hundreds: people still traveled to marvel at its construction, and its size. So what if they build the legs too narrow? They built a Statute of Liberty-sized edifice out the abandoned weapons of their attackers: the point isn’t the structural integrity of the sculpture, it’s the weight of steel resisted. The point of the Iron Throne wasn’t that it’s a comfortable chair, it’s that it was forged with dragon fire from the swords of Lords who submitted to Targaryen rule. Washington and Lincoln are not great presidents because they were perfect moral bastions. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge both Presidents as great leaders, and men who tried to be compassionate and wise, but who were perhaps limited by their time and their own experiences. Lincoln famously had some modicum of distaste for Native Americans, but also commuted 90% of the sentences of members of the Santee Sioux following the Dakota Uprising, and when told he would have probably gotten more support and votes from Minnesotans by letting more Sioux be executed, he responded that he could not “afford” to hang men for votes.

Legacies, after all, are complicated. My brother and I, due to scheduling conflicts, have not seen the last 2 seasons of Game of Thrones, so we retain positive memories of it. The first half of the show is good. The ending of the show is bad. These can both be true. Washington can be a unifying rock on which the country was built, and that rock can have some worrying fault lines in it regarding the treatment of Native Americans and Black people.

So, now that I’ve given you a great deal of ink on legacies to chew on, who wants a meat pie?

Actual Goddamn Cooking in a Food Blog

 Yeah, so that last section was longer than I intended it to be. (Hell, you should have seen the FIRST version, where I spend 300 words unpacking the point about Lincoln and white supremacy) THE IMPORTANT THING is that we dedicated a lot of space to the legacy of presidents for President’s day, and now it’s time to turn to the legacy of this meat pie. Which…is less impressive. Not non-existent: when I said “I have a beef and bacon pie recipe I never wrote up”, Nate’s eyes suddenly focused on a point through the table, as he said “man, that was…a LONG time ago”. So it IS remembered. Just not like, as an amazing triumph or a dismal failure. It was a thing, it was a bit more hassle than it should have been, we could probably do better with a second pass, let’s talk about what happened.

If you didn’t read our first discussion of the Pies from this cookbook, or our breakdown of the cookbook, a quick recap: the book was made by fans of the BOOKS who made a cooking blog replicating recipes from the series, often creating two versions of each dish, one more authentic to the medieval style and ingredients of the era, and one that’s more fitting with modern understandings of how to construct a meal. Like, the original medieval recipe for a Beef and Bacon pie they use has ½ cup of Bacon, and 1 cup of dried fruit (raisins, dates, and prunes). The Bacon, they assure us, endures in flavor as the fruit dissolves, but it’s still weird to read that fruit is out-numbering your bacon 2 to 1 in a beef and BACON pie.

For the modern version, you’re working with something much more like a Beef Stew in a Crust, covered in a lattice of bacon. Which is the first element to address, but one I didn’t take any pictures of: by the recipe, you’re supposed to weave together a lattice of bacon and cook it off, so it’ll be pre-cooked going onto the pie (otherwise, the bacon fat would render into the pie, and make it far too greasy.) I know I DID it, because you can see the cooked bacon in the background of a shot of Nate’s hand covered in flour.

A series of details may strike you, looking at this picture. Circled in Red is what I THOUGHT the important part fo this shot was going to be. Circled in GREEN is the cooked bacon that became more relevant thanks to time. And circled in Pink are the two moles that show that this is a picture of MY hand covered in spilled flour, meaning I don’t even know what the back of my own hands look like.

From there, you do a fair bit of mise-en-place (which you have time to do, since the bacon is taking up the oven), chopping up carrots, onion, potato, and beef into small chunks. Then you want to cook the vegetables in some butter until the onion has softened, and has turned golden. Toss the beef in some flour (so it retains its juices and browns more pleasantly) and toss it into the vegetables to brown for around 5 minutes.

It was so long since I made this, I first thought the meat was so pale because for some reason you froze it before throwing it in. When I read “toss in flour”, I went “oh, yeah, that makes sense.”

Then, add any excess flour to thicken the mixture of butter, vegetable liquids, and beef dripping into a roux. Add ½ cup of beef broth, along with some seasoning in the form of salt and pepper and a bit of dried rosemary. Simmer for 10 minutes to thicken, then set aside to let cool. You don’t want to directly move it into a piecrust, because you’ve got to do some measuring.

Specifically, your bacon lattice SHOULD be broader than your pie-plate, so take a moment to trim the edges of it (just flip the pie plate on top of the lattice, and cut off any bacon that sticks out, tossing the trimmed pieces into the beef mixture.). Then roll out a piecrust so that it overhangs the pieplate, and dump your beef mixture in.

It looks a little dry, doesn’t it? Man, hold onto that thought for a second.

Top with trimmed bacon lattice, fold back in the overhanging edges, and bake for 40 minutes, until the crust is golden. And our results looked great. But, as with the other legacies we’ve discussed today, they carried with them flaws, not first spotted in the construction, that led to rack and ruin. By which I mean “our filling turned out to be a little TOO much like “beef stew in a crust”, and really had no cohesion or structural integrity.”

And now you look foolish for agreeing with my assessment of “too dry.” The classic trap.

Everyone agreed that, flavorwise, there was nothing wrong with it. It tasted perfectly fine, it just didn’t function as a “pie”. Was this our fault? Quite possibly. The easiest possible point of failure I could find is that the original recipe does that slightly imprecise measurement method of “1 onion, chopped”, “1 carrot, cubed” and “1/2 a medium potato, cubed”. A measure of weight or expected volume after that would probably have helped us know if we were in the right place or not. Like, if my mother’s idea of a “medium potato” is half the size of the author’s, then that’s going to cause an obvious shortage of starch in the filling.

But overall, while there were structural problems in the pie we built that will certainly need to be addressed in future attempts at the project, the base flavorings were good. There was promise and potential to it. The same elements, distributed a little more sensibly and carefully, can produce what we’re actually aiming for. That’s the legacy of this pie. And of Washington and Lincoln, and of the Game of Thrones show. It’s alright to come up short. To fail. Remember, the goal is just to fail better next time.

THURSDAY: I’M GOING TO SKIP IT THIS WEEK, BECAUSE MY FAMILY WEEKEND HAS LED STRAIGHT INTO CRUNCH TIME FOR THE PLAY I’M IN, SO I’LL INSTEAD USE THE TIME I WOULD BE WRITING TO FINISH THOSE ANCHOR LINKS FOR THE FIRST HALF OF THE SITE BACKLOG.

MONDAY: I DON’T KNOW, BUT I’LL POST ABOUT IT ON FB, PROBABLY ON FRIDAY OR SATURDAY.

Recipe

Beef and Bacon pie

Ingredients

                Lattice

12 strips bacon

                Pie Filling

2 tbsp unsalted butter

1 onion, diced

1 carrot, cut into small chunks

½ medium potato, cubed

1 ½ pounds chuck steak or beef stew meat, cut into small chunks

2 tbsp all-purpose flour

½ cup beef broth

Salt and black pepper to taste

A large pinch dried rosemary, or preferred savory herb

                Pie

Enough pie dough for a single-crust 9-inch piece, unbaked.

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Weave a lattice of the bacon, alternating each strip under and over the others. Place in a rimmed and lined baking sheet to catch the bacon grease, and bake for 15-20 minutes until crispy. Remove from oven to cool (but leave on at temp for baking)

2. In a large skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onions, carrots, and potatoes, and cook until onions are softened and golden.

3.  In a medium bowl, toss the beef in the flour to coat. Add to the pan, and cook about 5 minutes, until beef is browned. Add remaining flour to pan, reduce heat to low, and stir to coat/combine, cooking for 1 minute to remove raw flour taste.

4. Add beef broth, salt, pepper, and herbs, and simmer for 10 minutes, until broth has formed a gravy. Remove pan from heat to cool.

5. Using pie-plate, trim bacon lattice to correct size, adding trimmed edges to beef mixture. Roll out pie dough so there is roughly 1/2” to 3/4” overhang (1.25 to 2 cm) over all edges. Fill with beef mixture, place lattice on top, and fold overhang over edges of lattice.

6. Place in oven and bake for 40 minutes. Pie is good hot or cold.