203 Quotes About Food-writing

Pies such as these - repositories of a week's leftovers - were once so commonplace as to earn their own names. I advise you to have no illusions as to the content of Scrap pies, Saturday pies or Old Maid pies.

The meat pie is the point at which many of the fine lines between frugality, harmless deception and sinister intent can meet.

the mince(meat) pie may have lost its meat, and its other ingredients may now be freely available all year round, but it has not lost its association with Christmas. Seventeenth-century Puritans tried hard to ban it (calling it 'idolatrie in crust') but they did not succeed: the Christmas mince pie lives.

The city of Gloucester, by ancient custom, presented a lamprey pie to the sovereign at Christmas time, as a token of loyalty. Lampreys are scaleless freshwater sucker-fish resembling eels, desirable in the past for their oily, gamey flesh. The tradition of gifting lamprey pies to the royal family continued until the end of Queen Victoria's reign, but was revived for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 when a 42-pound pie was cooked by the RAF catering crops.

We humans are constantly on the move around the world, and when we migrate we take our eating habits with us. We do so to use our agricultural and culinary knowledge, and because eating familiar food maintains our link with home and eases our homesickness. We may have to substitute ingredients and adapt our cooking methods, but even after several generations, our heritage is still evident in the food we serve at home.

Historically, one of the seminal features of a pie is its ability to be eaten out of the hand.

Once upon a time, everything baked in an oven that was not bread was 'pie'.

The problem with cooking meat this way [open fire] is that even if it does not burn, the valuable and tasty juices drip away and the meat dries and shrinks. Other cooks at other times got around this problem by wrapping the meat up to protect it - in leaves, for example. Or clay. Clay that, to another cook in perhaps, another time and place, felt just like dough. This last inspired step created the primitive meat pie - something medieval cooks called a 'bake-mete'.

The thick crust of the early pie acted like a baking dish. For hundreds of years, it was the only form of baking container - meaning everything was pie. The crust also, as it turned out, performed two other useful functions: it acted as a carrying and storage container (before lunch boxes) and, by virtue of excluding air, as a method of preservation (before canning and refrigeration).