Steak and kidney pie is a conventional English dish composed from steak, kidneys, vegetables, herbs, and sauce baked in a crust. Also called "Kate and Sidney," "Snake and Kiddy" or "Snake and Midget” pie in English patois, steak and kidney pie goes back to the early 1900s. Though individual cooks may add their own personalized touches when making the dish, the basic recipe remains extraordinarily similar over a century after its conception. The normal filling in a steak and kidney pie is formed with cubed meat steak and sliced kidneys of an ox, lamb or pig tossed with a meat broth based simple sauce.

Fresh herbs, like thyme or parsley, are added to the broth together with pepper and salt, onions and a thickening agent like flour or cornstarch. As other foods became widely available through the years, additions have been made to the recipe with some chefs adding Worcestershire sauce or port and others using garlic or mushrooms for additional flavour. The one crust version of the pie uses puff or short crust pastry.

This covers just the apex of the pie without absolutely enclosing the filling from the bottom. Two crust steak and kidney pie is often made with heated water crust pastry to avoid having the filling soak through the base of the crust. Hot pies have been eaten in Britain as far back as the fifteenth century; nonetheless it was not till round the late 1800s that meat turned into a classic ingredient. A basic beef pie consisted of hot beef, broth and mushrooms under a crust. Steak and kidney pie is assumed to have developed from these pies, in part, for business reasons.

Kidneys were less expensive than meat and may be used to replace some of it while still providing a filling meal. Adding kidneys also served to bring extra flavour and an engaging texture to the normal meat pie. Steak and kidney pudding was a predecessor to steak and kidney pie. It was manufactured by lining a pudding dish with suet crust made from hard beef or mutton fat removed from across the animal's kidneys. After filling the dish with meat steak and sauce, entire kidneys were regularly incorporated, and the top was covered with more suet.