Mrs. Beeton describes this English favorite as “a homely but savoury dish/’ although her recipe transforms this working-class meal into a genteel pie of steak and kidneys. It is actually sausages embedded in Yorkshire pudding, or, in a pinch, mashed potatoes. It’s a dish that always brings to mind Paul West’s wild, half-crazed, comic Alley Jaggers, a “poor yob what plasters walls” in a Midlands village—perhaps because West has suffused the novel with more food images
