NOW let us praise the pie. I was going to write ‘now let us praise the humble pie’ but in my mind there’s nothing humble about the pie (unless you’re eating humble pie of course) so let us praise the pie.
Let us praise the glorious pie. Let us praise the magnificent pie. Let us praise the sublime pie, which is a kind of pie made with inferior limes. I prefer the lime pie.
If this column is a speech then let me say Free Pies For All. If this column is a magic trick then let my flourish this pie from a top hat. If this column is a work of literature then let me write piems and read War and Pies aloud.
Yes, you guessed it: today we’re talking about pies. If this column is a sermon then today our learning is about the pie and we are praising the pie. Aye; I like pies.
A few years ago I got the perfect job: I was paid to eat pies. I made a series of five 15-minute programmes for the radio, and each programme featured a different kind of pie which I sampled and, in one case, helped to make.
I wanted to call the series Crust Almighty but because it went out on a Sunday afternoon we weren’t allowed to, so we ended up calling it Who Ate All The Pies? To which the answer was me, obviously.
The first pie we tried was the Stargazy Pie down in the village of Mousehole in Cornwall. It’s basically a fish pie with the head sticking out at one end and the tail sticking out at the other.
Because it was a radio programme, we had to make great use of dramatic sound and luckily the chef at the pub we did the recording in was a pretty dramatic kind of chap.
We asked him to narrate the making of the pie and he did. He got a cleaver and shouted, almost breaking our recording equipment, NOW I AM CUTTING THE HEAD OFF THE FISH!
The producer with the microphone moved away a little. Then the chef shouted NOW I AM CUTTING THE TAIL OFF THE FISH!
The producer moved to the edge of the room. The chef carried on shouting all the way until the whole pie was prepared and the oven door was slammed shut with a mighty CLANG and the chef grinned in triumph. And then the producer noticed that he hadn’t switched the recording equipment on. So we had to do it again, but pretending this time.
Luckily the chef was just as good the second time around and you would have thought he was cutting the head and tail off a real fish. The second pie was the traditional pie and mash down the East End of London.
We went to a pie and mash shop and ate the pie and the mash and that odd thing called Liquor, which is a kind of parsley sauce. I did enjoy it and I reckoned that the liquor would be nice on some of the pies we have round here.
The most mysterious of the pies I sampled was the Sussex Churdle, a recent culinary rediscover made not far from a place called Berwick in Sussex. It’s a pie filled with liver and bacon and there’s a small chimney in it down which melted cheese is poured.
As far as I can remember it was absolutely delicious bit to be honest ‘as far as I can remember’ doesn’t take me very far because the man who made the pies also brewed his own beer and we sampled them both together.
We went to Dundee to try a Scotch Pie; in Dundee a pie is called a ‘peh’ and if you want and ordinary pie and an onion pie you go into a butcher’s and you say ‘ah’ll hae a peh, an’ an inyin yin an aw!’ I went into a butcher’s shop and said those words and the man behind the counter said ‘you’re no fae these pairts!’ How could he tell?
Our final pie was a Melton Mowbray pie, and I helped to make one in a factory and when I tasted it, it was okay, but it reminded me how much I love the pies that we get in the Barnsley borough. Maybe I’ll propose a second series: Who Ate All The Barnsley Pies? Crust Almighty!
