Cadmus Steak & Mushroom Pie

After a bout with a winder cold slave is eager to get back to cooking. Felt the need for something special for my Master. So this recipe has a few steps that take awhile. It is old fashioned home style cooking. Steak & mushroom pie has been called Britain on a plate, variations are everywhere in that country. This recipe is dedicated to a LGBT hero painter Paul Cadmus, a short biography fallows.

Slow cooking beef until it is tender, fresh mushrooms and onions between layers of pastry can warm the cloudiest day and fill a strong mans stomach till his toes curl!

Ingredients:

2 lbs good chuck roast cut into chunks

2 onions

2 cups fresh button mushrooms, rinsed and quartered

1 large carrot, peeled and grated

1 prepared pie crust

2 tube crescent rolls

salt, pepper, smoky paprika, garlic powder

1 jar beef gravy

cornstarch

egg

Directions:

On the night before

Preheat oven to 215 degrees.

Spray a dutch oven and rough chop an onion into eights, place in pot. Cut the roast into 2 inch chunks dust with a mixture of your seasonings: salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic powder. Place in pot over the bed of onions.

Cover with foil and a lid. Let slow roast for 3 hours.

Drain the pot and transfer the beef to a bowl, when cooled, place in refrigerator overnight.

Next day:

Pre heat oven to 400 degrees with a pizza stone in the oven!

Take out pie crust, prick the bottom according to package directions and let bake for about half of the time listed. Be sure to place the foil pan inside of a regular metal pan for support.

While that is in oven take out the beef and let come to room temperature.

Rinse and quarter the mushrooms. Peel and grate the carrots into a bowl. 

Cut up the remaining onion into the size of the quartered mushrooms. Do the same with the beef.

This is a good time to pick over the beef and remove any grizzle or fat.

Mix together in a skillet over medium heat and pour in the gravy.

Stir in the grated carrot.

Stir occasionally until flavors meld and filling is heated through. If it is runny, add a slurry of 1 Tbs cornstarch mixed with 2 tbs beef broth. Stir until thick!

By now the crust should be ready to come out of the oven. Leave the oven on.

Let both the filling and the crust cool slightly. 

Cover the counter with a sheet of waxed paper.

Unroll the crescent rolls. Separate into triangles.

Now spoon the slightly cooled filling into the pie crust.

Next notice the size of the pie. You want the triangles to go from the edge toward the center, overlapping the points. Roll the short side of the triangle up until it fits!

Brush the top with the beaten egg to make a pretty finish.

Finish baking for another 18 to 20 minutes until the pie is as pretty as you can stand it!

Allow the pie to sit for 10 minutes before serving.

For an extra English treat, Mix up french onion soup with some cornstarch and heat stirring until it is a thick gravy to serve on top!

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Kp7WX7y8M

Note this recipe makes 2 pies, slave took meals to several elderly neighbors who were not feeling well.

So honored to be serving my Master Indy with a British special!

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

Paul Cadmus 

American artist widely known for painting social interactions in urban settings. He also produced many highly finished drawings of single nude male figures.

Cadmus was born on December 17, 1904, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father, who studied with Robert Henri, worked as a commercial artist, and his mother illustrated children's books.

At age 15, Cadmus left school to attend the National Academy of Design for 6 years. Cadmus learned to draw from plaster casts and two years later he was admitted to the life drawing class. He received a bronze medal from the Academy the following year for excellence in the discipline. He began to study printmaking in 1923, and soon after began exhibiting his work and publishing illustrations for the weekly book review section of The New York Herald-Tribune. By 1926 Cadmus completed his course work at the Academy, having won numerous scholarships and prizes for excellence.

He then enrolled at the Art Students League of New York in 1928 taking life-drawing lessons while working as a commercial illustrator at a New York advertising agency.

From 1928 to 1931 Cadmus was employed as a layout artist at a New York advertising agency.

It was here that he met fellow student Jared French who was to become perhaps the single most important influence on Cadmus’s life and work.

It was French who encouraged Cadmus to abandon commercial work and pursue a career as a fine artist. He urged his lover to use the time consuming method of egg tempera.

Cadmus compared the delicate brushstrokes of egg tempera to “heartbeats, each equally important yet almost invisible or unnoticeable.”

Several years after meeting, the two decided to travel to Europe in search of a more stimulating environment where they could live inexpensively and paint.

They continued their education while traveling through Europe from 1931 to 1933.

Cadmus’s sister Fidelma sent him newspaper clippings on the newly organized, government-sponsored Public Works of Art Project. With their passports about to expire and their money almost spent, Cadmus and French returned to America in October of that year. Cadmus was accepted into the PWAP in December as one of the program’s first participants.

He was to be employed by painting murals at post offices. 

In 1934, at the age of 29, he painted The Fleet's In! This painting, which featured carousing sailors and women, included a stereotypical homosexual solicitation and erotic exaggeration of clinging pants seats and bulging crotches. It was the subject of a public outcry led by Admiral Hugh Rodman, saying, "It represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl."

The publicity helped to launch Cadmus’s career, and he stated at the time, "I had no intention of offending the Navy. Sailors are no worse than anybody else. In my picture I merely commented on them – I didn't criticize."

In 1938, his painting Pocahantas Saving the Life of John Smith, a mural painted for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia, had to be retouched when some observers noticed a fox pelt suggestively hanging between the legs of an Indian depicted in the painting. Cadmus used his lover, Jared French, as the model for John Smith in the mural.

In 1940, two paintings, Sailors and Floozies (1938) and Seeing the New Year In, were removed from public view because the Navy "didn't like it" and there was "too much smell about it." The paintings were being exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition and were removed, while a third, Venus and Adonis, remained.

Cadmus, considered to be a master draftsman, was interested in the Italian Renaissance artists, the so-called "masters of muscle."

He was transfixed by the human body, both the ideal and the repulsive. His ideal was a stylized erotic version of the male body. He found the grotesque everywhere from Greenwich Village cafes, subway stations, the beach at Coney Island to American tourists in an Italian piazza. His art is a form of satire and caricature of his subjects.

Cadmus’s first one-man show was held at Midtown Galleries in New York in 1937. The exhibition attracted more than 7,000 viewers, many of whom were eager to see for themselves these controversial works that had received such extensive newspaper and magazine coverage and caused such unprecedented public outcries.

From 1937 until 1945, Cadmus, his lover, Jared French, and French's wife, Margaret Hoening, summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PaJaMa ("Paul, Jared, and Margaret"). In between Provincetown, Truro, Fire Island, and New York, they staged various black-and-white photographs of themselves with their friends, both nude and clothed.

Later in the 1940s, Cadmus and his then lover, George Tooker, formed a complicated relationship with French and his wife. When the Frenches bought a home in Hartland, Vermont, they gave Cadmus a house of his own on the property, which French later took back and gave to his Italian lover.

In 1950 several of Cadmus’s works were included in “American Symbolic Realism” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Architect was exhibited at the Whitney Annual. In the years 1951 to 1953 Cadmus lived and worked in France and Italy.

In 1965, Cadmus met and began a relationship with Jon (Farquhar) Anderson (July 30, 1937, New Haven, CT - October 21, 2018, Weston, CT), a former cabaret star, in Nantucket that lasted until Cadmus' death in 1999.

From the beginning of their 35-year relationship, the then 27-year-old Anderson was Cadmus' model and muse in many of his works.

He began work on a series of highly developed drawings of the male nude for which Jon Anderson is the principal model. The large sheets of paper are often hand-toned, and the rendering is sensuous and deliberate.

In 1999, he died at his home in Weston, Connecticut, due to advanced age, just five days shy of his 95th birthday.