I MAY HAVE EATEN WORSE

As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, 'No worst there is none.' Here's one I ate about a week ago.

Of course, Mrs Lovett's pies have the great advantage of being fictional.  Mine was all too real, and admittedly it wasn't in London.

But not all the pie news is bad. A few days back, in London, we were in the Viaduct Tavern. Some sources will tell you that there are jail cells in the cellar, once associated with Newgate Prison, though other sources say this is nonsense.  Even so the place is happy to call itself a gin palace, as well they might.  The interior looks like this:

 And there we were presented with a pie-based menu, which ticked a great many boxes.  I briefly fantasized that there was some rehabilitated Mrs. Lovett working out back expressing herself through pastry, but no, these were Mr. Barrick’s Pies:

 

PHOTOS BY GANNON-NICHOLSON STUDIOS.

We went for the Pork and Black Pudding

 

and the Chorizo Style Pork and Wensleydale.

 

The Pork and Black Pudding was good, though I could have used a lot more black pudding. but the Chorizo and Wensleydale was superb - a highpoint in pie art, largely because of that cheese topping.  I can’t tell you exactly what they do to the Wensleydale to create the effect, something to do with curds and whipping I imagine but don’t hold me to that.  In any case they’re doing something very right.

 

       And possibly the most exciting thing I discovered in my recent pie research was that it is apparently possible to own a prop pie as used in Sweeney Todd, such as this one belonging to a collector who goes by the name of ‘Guardian Devil.’  What a time to be alive.

SCRANNING IN SHEFFIELD

I have been in Sheffield eating like a lord, and also like a Sheffielder, which in many ways is same thing.

I think I grew up in Sheffield at a very bad time for British food.  A previous generation would happily have eaten rabbit, pigeon, pigs’ trotters, maybe even venison if they were able to get it.  A later generation grew up watching fancy chefs on tv and "experimenting" with kiwi fruit. But I grew up in the days when a mother could think she was doing right by her family when she served frozen fish fillets, and steak and kidney pie out of a tin.

Consequently I don’t often get nostalgic for the food of my youth, but the roast pork sandwiches of Sheffield (and I know they’re found other places too) continue to haunt my taste buds.  This is one I ate at the weekend from Beres Pork Sandwich Shop in the city centre.  

Beres have been in business since 1961, which probably makes them newcomers in the world of the Sheffield pork sandwich – Funk’s of Hillsborough have been around since at least the 1890s.

And you know, I like the roast pork well enough, but I think it’s the extras that really move me: the stuffing, the apple sauce, the crackling, all of them present in the sandwich above.  The crackling is only “recommended for people with strong, healthy teeth” – it says so on the bag.

It surely comes as no surprise that Sheffield is the home of a good meat pie, and so no huge surprise that there’s a restaurant on Division Street called Pieminister – part of a small chain that was actually founded in Bristol.  We tried going there at about 9 o clock on Saturday night, but were told they’d sold out of everything except mashed potato, which was surely a good sign, so we returned the next night.

The two pies you see in the picture above are the Moo – “British Beef Steak and Craft Ale,” and the Deerstalker – “Wild British Venison, Bacon, Red Wine and Green Lentil.”  Gotta say I didn’t notice the green lentil, but you tend not to when there’s venison around.

I don’t suppose hotdogs are especially local to Sheffield.  I occasionally had one as a kid, but it wasn’t a meal, just something you ate when you were at the seaside or at a fun fair, kind of like candy floss.  But after eating hotdogs in Chicago last month it was impossible to resist the “Bulldog” on the menu at the Fox and Duck in Fulwood Road, Broomhill, a pub that calls itself “a lively boozer.”  And no, I have never heard the word scran used in Sheffield or anywhere else.

The Bulldog was pretty decent, and the things on the top that look like wood shavings are in fact “grilled and crispy onions" sitting right on top of the raw onions.

There was also deep fried and breaded haggis with tandoori ketchup (fusion cuisine, we got it!).  It looked like this and was “interesting” though I don’t think it would satisfy many true haggis fans:

Need I say that Japanese food didn’t feature in my family’s cuisine, or anybody else’s at the time I was growing up in Sheffield.   Just a few years back, as my Japanophilia was taking hold, I tried to find a Japanese eatery in Sheffield and could only locate one, which from the reviews sounded very dodgy indeed, so I didn’t eat there.  But now Sheffield has a significant Asian population, not many of them Japanese I’d have thought, but even so these days you can find 15 or more Japanese restaurants in town.

We settled for the Mr Miyagi Revolving Sushi Bar, again on Division Street, just a pie or gyoza’s throw from Pieminister.  Of course like many other restaurants that describe themselves as revolving, the restaurant itself doesn’t rotate, but there’s a circulating conveyor belt that delivers the food.  In this case the empty belt continued to move at eye level, even as the food came via a waitress.  

Above is a Classic Sashimi Set, and two Oyster sashimi – which were as good as you could get most places, and more than you could once possibly have hoped for in Sheffield or within a few thousand miles of it.

DON'T YOU LOVETT?

Perhaps you know how it is.  You arrive in London after a ten hour flight, and you take the Heathrow Express to Paddington and you’re completely out of it, and yet you want to plunge into the life of the city, and so you look for somewhere to eat that isn’t a chain or a dubious looking burger bar and when you see a pub named The Dickens Tavern, just off Praed Street, you think well, how bad can it be? 

         And to be fair, the Dickens Tavern is a perfectly decent inner-London boozer, the longest pub in England by some accounts, though I’m not sure that anybody’s keeping very accurate records on these things.  And so I ordered a beer and I thought well, a pie would go down pretty well with that.  And I ordered the braised beef and bone marrow pie.  And in truth I wasn’t expecting too much – but when it came it was still a disappointment.

It had obviously been microwaved, and you and I surely agree that microwaved pastry is an offence against god and man, and it came with equally microwaved mashed potatoes and veggies, and the whole thing was truly dreadful.

But you know in some strange way this was oddly pleasing, because we’re constantly hearing that London is the middle of an ongoing foodie renaissance - and in broad terms this is true enough - but it’s somehow reassuring to know that the old ancient tradition of dismal English pub food still endures.  

          There was also the consolation that since this was my first day, things could only get better.  And they did.  Of which considerably more later.

PIES

Who ate all the pies? Well it wasn’t me, not all of them, but I did my best when I was in England.  At the Founder’s Arms on the Thames, within site of St Paul’s and the Tate Modern, I went for Founder's Ploughman's Board.  It looked like this.

“Cropwell stilton, mature cheddar cheese, ham hock terrine, caramelized onions, gammon ham, hand raised pork pie, branston pickle, sourdough, gherkins,” it said on the menu, and it was all true.

Then I went to the Puckeridge Point to Point at Horseheath in Essex (yes, really),

where I had a couple of pies from the stall belonging to The Cheese and Pie Man.  They have a motto: “A pie is for Christmas not for life and a pie a day makes the day go quicker.”

The one on the left is duck and orange, and the one on the right is – wait for it - pork and black pudding.  Have mercy, Mr. Pie Man.

Pies have been on my mind partly because I’ve been reading Alexander Theroux’s forthcoming book Einstein’s Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias – 800 or so pages, exploding with the curiosities of gastronomy and it contains this description of Dr. Johnson’s eating style,

“Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” No sign of this below:

Theroux quotes this from the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I think it’s originally from Macaulay’s Life of Johnson, but I don’t know where he got the information, not by observation, since he wasn’t born until some years after Johnson’s death.

Boswell doesn’t appear to be the source, though he does report Johnson as saying,  “I generally have a meat pie on Sunday: it is baked at a public oven, which is very properly allowed, because one man can attend it; and thus the advantage is obtained of not keeping servants from church to dress dinners,”

And then, in Manningtree, at a restaurant named Lucca, in fact on a Sunday, I had this calzone:

 I think a calzone is a pie by any other name. True it’s made with pizza dough rather than pastry, but then again pizzas are sometimes called pies which has always seemed misleading to me, and in any case the end result is still an edible container for whatever filling the chef decides on.  This was a Calzone di Mare:

         “Tomato, fior di latte mozzarella, calamari, clams, prawns, mussels, garlic, chill,” it says on the menu.

Boswell tells us that Johnson always ate fish with his fingers, “because I am short-sighted and afraid of bones.”I think he’d have been OK with the boneless Calzone de Mare.  I think his veins would have been standing right out, I think the moisture would have been on his forehead.