Vintage Recipe: Beef Upside-Down Pie

Well, I guess the old expression is true: two outta three ain’t bad.

My first two endeavors with 1944 cooking were extremely successful. The Swiss Cheese Pie was superb (although, update: the leftovers do not keep well) and the Baked Bean and Hamburger Savory was delectable. So to say I had high hopes for round three, Beef Upside-Down Pie, would be an understatement. Better luck next time, it seems.

First off, I must start by saying that I have made much worse dishes. Much. Oh the stories my poor family could tell about beet soup, tofu, and my now infamous “90 alarm chili” (turns out a few tablespoons of cayenne pepper is slightly too much. Oops). Thank goodness Beef Upside-Down Pie was not even close to those culinary disasters. In fact, the dish really wasn’t even bad. It just wasn’t great. 

That being said, Beef Upside-Down Pie was created with a very specific purpose in mind and it more than checked the box. 

This recipe was located within a section of the 1944 Good Housekeeping Cook Book entitled “Making Beef Go Farther” and gave the hint of combining meat with vegetables, rice, and breadstuff when meat is scarce. As meat was on the list of rationed foods in the United States from March of 1943 through November of 1945, these types of recipes were common in cookbooks and women’s magazines during the war years. Red stamps from Ration Book Two were used to purchase meat during this time and those over the age of 12 were allowed 2.5 pounds of meat a week. That means, in my household of three adults, we would be allotted 7.5 pounds of meat every 7 days. This recipe for Beef Upside-Down Pie called for just 1/2 of a pound of ground beef and served 4. 

Successful in stretching the meat ration? Absolutely. But taste? Well, the very component that allowed me to use so little meat was what made the recipe less tasty than it could have been and that was… the biscuit. 

The Mister, my Maman, and I all agreed that the biscuit was much too dry and there was way too much of it. In fact, we all came to the same conclusion: that the meat portion of the dish was quite good but the flavor was totally overwhelmed by the dryness and sheer volume of the biscuit. My husband commented that the “meat is good, when you can find it underneath all the bread.” 

While I was preparing the biscuit dough, I did take note of the amount of baking powder used and expected it to rise a fair amount, but three inches? Well, butter my biscuit. That was the equivalent of a small loaf of bread on top of a hamburger!

That being said, I would consider making this again with one major change: cut the recipe for the biscuit in half or even in thirds. That would balance the taste and allow the delicious juices from the pie to soak into the biscuit, making it much more palatable. 

As to time, it took exactly 30 minutes for me to get this into the oven and another 20 minutes to bake. 50 minutes was pushing it a little for a weeknight supper, but it was a simple recipe to make. 

All in all, this was a 2/5.

Bon appetit!