For once, I am in full agreement with our colonial cousins’ approach to dating. If one renders today’s date as 3/14/16, then one will not fail to notice the similarity to everyone’s favourite constant, 3.14159 (with a spot of rounding)
So in honour of this conjunction of mathematics and calendars, I ask the Afterword, what is your favourite pie?
NB Fray Bentos is not an acceptable answer.
I favour a sweet potato, goats cheese and spinach affair myself
Meat and potato, hard to come by in Surrey, unfortunately (perhaps not for my waistline though). Tend to have to wait for trips up to Cheshire to indulge properly.
Once again I feel out of step with the rest of the world. After all these years I would have thought someone would have come up with a better wrapping for the goodies inside than boring old pastry. Given that I think I’d opt for lemon meringue pie as my favourite with its minimalist approach to pastry. I do like a nice mince pie as well but why do they always make the pastry sooo thick?
We enjoyed a pie-off the other evening, hosted by some chums. After extensive deliberation and a good deal of voting scrutiny, the eventual winner was a chicken and ham shortcrust affair.
M y favourite is cottage pie, though in the opinion of some, it is not a true pie, as pastry plays no role,
In that case, why is it called Cottage Pie?
Ditto Fish pie. And Shepherd’s Pie.
When that woman’s done that Savile enquiry thing she needs to sort this shit out.
Yes, my American wife makes a lovely pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. But although she calls it a pie, it only has pastry on the bottom, not on top.
A nanosecond’s reflection suggests that a sweet pastry pie without a pastry top is called a tart in the UK, isn’t it? A treacle tart or a Bakewell tart for example.
Scottish mutton pie. Baked beans in the crown. HP sauce. Heart attack. Heaven.
Beat me to it, indeed a thing of wonder. I prefer it fresh from the butcher (or baker), in a grease-stained paperbag, to eat in the street.
For a very long time I thought that my nana had worked in a pie factory. Turned out it was the Pye factory.
So that’s why she said she’d spent a whole week in 1966 handling David Bowie’s 7-incher.
It was radios, not records.
*makes knob joke*
Not ‘radius’ then.
Hurr, hu….
(Oops, sorry. This is Moose territory)
Given your moniker, you’ve as much right to make that noise as anyone
A good friend of mine worked at the Pye records factory/warehouse out near Croydon in the 60s and some of the stories he tells are enough to make record fans weep.
Kinks aside we tend to think of Pye as being a bit stuffy, but it wasn’t all Searchers, Petula Clark, Lonnie Donegan and Joe Brown. Back then Pye had the UK rights to the Chess records catalogue and released all that great blues/R&B stuff via their Pye International label.
Pye also had rights to Warner Bros and Reprise material until around 1970 (when Warners set up their own UK operation). So they handled stuff like the early Grateful Dead and Electric Prunes LPs. The first Beefheart LP as well as many obscure prog albums also came out on Pye. Not forgetting all the Donovan stuff, of course.
Thievery was rife among the young warehouse employees naturally and records were flying out the door all the time. My mate still has many of them, including the unfeasibly rare and valuable 1967 Dave Davies 7″ EP.
May be boring, but a proper steak and kidney encased in pastry, none of that flaky lid nonsense, with gravy, mash and mushy peas is hard to beat. There’s a pub in central London – The Mill, i think – that did this perfectly.
My ears! Arrest this man.
Everybody knows that a pie is a bowl of gravy with a circle of Jus-Rol sitting on top of it.
I’m from the South. What the hell do I know about pies.
More than people who work in pub kitchens, clearly
Chicken and mushroom pie – the kind you get in chip shops.
I do a mean ham & egg pie which is currently my fave.
Full eggs and smoked gammon for the filling – ludicrously expensive for peasant food.
Pizza.
I was always taken by New Yorkers calling Pizza a Pizza Pie.
I’ve always found that disappointing. The idea of a pie with a pizza inside it is obviously too beautiful (and dangerous) to physically exist.
In my student house in the second year at uni, we found a 1950s recipe book. It was awesome. My two favourite recipes were for pizza, and for tomato and mushroom soup. The pizza evidently had to be explained to the audience and so the heading was “Pizza (Italian tomato pie)”.
The second recipe said “take 1 tin tomato soup. Take 1 tin mushroom soup. Mix. Heat.”
Steak and Stilton Pieminister pie. Bloody lovely with mash and peas braised in butter and stock.
Take a trip to Southsea, home turf to renowned dentist to The Afterword, Lenny Law, and treat yourself to two of the best things in life, records and pies at Pie & Vinyl http://www.pieandvinyl.co.uk/menu/
The Steak and Blue Cheese “Blue Moo” is wonderful.
Steak and Stilton is, of course, the correct answer to the OP’s question.
A legendary local supplier here in Reading is Sweeney & Todd who do all sorts of fantastic ingredients, though my long-term favourite remains their Rump Steak & Stilton.
Sweeney’s is a unique combination of pie shop, mini-pub, and cafe. It’s been in Reading since just after the Earth cooled, is splendidly un-glamorous, and highly recommended:
http://www.sweeneyandtodd.co.uk/pies/
I should add that the cafe bit (or ‘restaurant’, as they amusingly style it) serves only their pies, hot, with chips/mash, veg, and gravy.
and bloody good it is too – highly recommended.
Also the location of a previous Thames Valley Mingle. Although, there is no blue plaque there yet.
A ringing endorsement there!
I did not know that there’d been a TV Mingle there – yes, a very Afterwordy venue.
Mmmmm Pieminister. It was their Heidi pie I was thinking of in my first comment. They have just added a new veggie one to the range which looks like saag paneer in a pie. This could be incredible.
West Cornwall Pasty Company, pork and apple pasty. Other Cornish Pasty manufacturing companies are available.
Tarte a la Morue. Bacalau. Salt cod. Whatever you want to call it.
Portuguese salt cod, layered with greens and spuds. Fabulous.
Let’s hear it for the good ‘ol Pork Pie. With Piccalilli (home made).
Such a good pie they named a hat after it.
Such a good hat, Charles Mingus composed a song about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sfe_8RAaJ0
I don’t like food pies at all. The month I spent in England in 1982 I was served pie with either peas or baked beans every day by the people I stayed with!
But sweet pies are nice. My favourite is a chocolate and banana pie that I’ve invented, but a gooseberry pie with custard or ice cream is also wonderful. And rhubarb pie. And the applepineapple pie I make with lots of cinnamon. And blackberry pie. And (goes on listing sweet pies for a very long time, drooling)
Inspired by this thread I have persuaded my housemate to make a pie on Thursday and am now in the process of trying to ensure he makes it sausage and leek.
But I won’t be able to say until Friday whether or not it is my favourite pie.
Apple pie. With cream.
W.r.t. 2 Pi in O.P. – I notice now that no matter how many times I mistype my password I am never presented with a maths problem. Is this “dumbing down” of entry into The Afterword reflective of the slipping standards in society generally which The Daily Mail so diligently catalogues?
I remember when I first registered I had to provide an answer to Fermi’s Paradox in less than a thousand words, which was then graded for plausibility and elegance.