This is a tale of three pies. I am drawn, time and again, to things which should, given my almost singularly English ancestry (a once-upon-a-time foray into Ancestry.com revealed a family lineage that barely made it further afield than the outer reaches of the M25,) have someplace in my family’s culinary memory, but don’t.
School food aside, I think I ate my first truly delicious pie in Australia circa 2002. There is, of course, a rich culinary heritage of full-pastry-deep-filled-meat pies there and, as with many ubiquitous things of spurious authenticity, they are quite often not very good and then sometimes, to remind you occasionally just why the thing has reached such levels of popularity, they can be extraordinarily good.
With an Australian meat pie as my gateway drug, back in England and in my early twenties, I spent a happy few years inhaling pies of every creed and construct. Pies in tins, Ginsters from service stations, pies from the freezer section and pies from caffs of varied quality. For a period, decades ago, I regularly visited a van in a layby off the A303, when driving the three hours to visit a girlfriend, just because they had a hot cabinet stuffed to brimming with gold tinned chicken pies. I am sure they came in frozen and were microwaved before sitting in wait for me, but they were just the ticket at the halfway point in my drive. And so, just as I had learned on the terraces of the Melbourne Cricket Ground a decade before, I would make a hole in the top and fill it with ketchup before folding back the tin underneath to reveal a crescent of pie to bite right into. The van has long since closed, I always keep an eye out as I career past, but the memory of those pies lives on.
This week I was lucky enough to spend some time with Austin Yardley, the proprietor of Terry’s Cafe (and now Maria’s Market Cafe to boot,) who walked me through some of the original menus at Terry’s from the ’80s. His old man had been a Smithfield butcher as well as running cafes on building sites with his sister, Terry’s Aunty Kath, and so when they opened Terry’s, their first permanent site, they set the menu up as any working man might expect. Opening early, one could get a fried egg, some toast, a cup of aggressively brewed tea, all served with a grin and a pithy remark, right up until midday when the menu would switch and the options became meat pudding, toad in the hole, sausage and herb pie, etc, all served with chips, beans or peas, and a gravy boat of, well, gravy.
Terry’s did not exist then for the hungover office worker or well-researched tourist who needs a full English to sate them at half-past-twelve; it existed for blokes, mainly, who wore heavy boots and engaged in heavy lifting, or wore softer shoes and drove Hackey carriages. Austin is a savvy businessman and has responded to market demands since he took over the full running of the place after his fathers death, and as such a proper breakfast is available right up until last orders at 2 pm, but the reason I bang on about all of this is that my time with Austin was punctuated by a sausage and herb pie (below), and it was a transcendental experience. The pie, prepared to a tried and true recipe and resembling, at least in its complete state, before being cut, something that a nation with more culinary pretensions might call a pithivier or a galette, was a true joy. The hope is that Austin’s version will appear in a cookbook in the not too distant future, but I will share my recreation of what I ate with him for paid subscribers below.
A cousin, albeit rather distantly, of the pie I ate at Terry’s, but with the same mission to keep the art and tradition of British pie making alive, The Maids of Honour in Kew, South West London, has a daily counter of some of the finest pies you’ll likely eat, both sweet and savoury. Unlike the Australian style pies, but much like the sausage and herb pie that Austin gave me the pleasure of, most of the Maids of Honour pies are of relatively freeform construction. I am guessing here, but I suspect they start with a round of good, homemade, shortcrust pastry, onto which is piled a heaping portion of perfectly seasoned and perfectly simple filling - the options being steak pie, chicken pie, salmon pie, vegetable pie and minced pork pie (which is the closest thing I have tried to the sausage and herb pie from Terry’s) - before another round of pastry is settled over the top and sealed in place with an egg wash. I have been a regular visitor to the Maid’s of Honour since being introduced by my wife and her family almost ten years ago. The place has changed hands, but that is all that has changed. The counter when you enter is to step back in time. The story is that the namesake tart, a honeyed little custard tart that almost curdles in the baking, has links back to the court of Henry VIII, and the fine patisserie and viennoiserie on offer wouldn’t have looked out of place coming out of his kitchens. He would have no doubt approved of the pies too. The connoisseurs’ pie at the Maids of Honour is the salmon pie, a piece of fine cooking that likely deserves more ceremony than its position in the chiller cabinet affords it. Again I am guessing, but the filling has traces of salmon that has been poached in a kingly court bouillon. The salmon itself is cooked to perfection and seems to have been anointed in nothing more than a reduction of its poaching liquor. To enjoy a slice of the salmon pie with a watercress salad is pure joy. Again, a recipe for paid subscribers follows below.
The final pie in this holy tryptic is a potato and onion pie that I have long misremembered as being a Simon Hopkinson creation. I have always attributed it to one of his books, or maybe a TV show that he once made, but a recent search unearthed no evidence of the pie I now cook from memory, but that I was sure came from his fair mind. Regardless, for now, he can take the credit, and his cheese and onion pie, a paean to his late mother, might well have laid the foundations for the creation below. This potato and onion pie is the sort of thing that makes being a professional cook such a magical profession. Save the pastry there are four ingredients - butter, potatoes, onions and salt - but when they combine under pressure and get wrapped in a pie crust, they could be a stardust and moon rock for all that they are recognisable foodstuffs from this realm. The alchemy, and the technique, produce a pressed pie filling that has roots in Gentleman’s Relish and good mature cheddar, and yet neither are present nor needed, here. Of the three pies, this is the one that I would choose every day for my saddlebag, it’s only accompaniment a lick of fiery English mustard
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