Smuggler Archive

I am not sure if I like pie.

It is the type of annoying question that is asked endlessly, repetitively by a twelve-year-old boy with an irritating sense of humour.

What is a pie, anyway? A stew with structure, mousse in a noose, mustered custard? Besides, I'm on a diet, and pie is just an extra layer of sin (not that sin's necessarily a bad thing), a puff around the protein.

What I could really do with is a spoonful of inspiration, a cup of courage and a dash of diligence. Will I find these in a pie?

Take lemon meringue, woman's magazine pie, for example. It has a crunchy base - easy to make. Crush up ancient dunking biscuits from the bedside barrel, soak them in the greasiness of melted butter and leave them to firm and mould themselves into a new shape at the bottom of the tin. The filling is tart yet sweet, jellied. Without a structure to its sides it wobbles gently as you carry it. The topping is light, whipped airy whiteness, the white of wedding dresses, of clouds before the rain falls upon unnoticing lovers, of spume at an English seaside. It's gone in a couple of bites, no need to chew - and what's that at the end? That slight surprise, that lack of honest eggs and lemons, that bitter-sweet synthetic aftertaste - ah, yes, it was obviously made up from a packet of powder.

What about an apple pie then? It doesn't have to be American, or even à la mode. There's a better structure here, a more substantial longer novel, still feminine with its sprinkled sugar-crust pastry. It's a shame about the mush of bramleys at the bottom, stewed to an amorphous layer of cotton-wool, but the coxes make up for it, sliced crisp and fanned into a pattern, with a tartness, a bite, a splash of colour at the edges where the peel has been left on. An apple pie is easy to pack, perfect for a seaside picnic, light on the stomach, easy to digest, but not sustaining for long.

Quiche is for vegetarians, the bearded, bilious, bad-breathed - guides to numerology, astrology; handbooks of the boring and the arcane.

Game pie is redolent of guns and traps, strange morsels floating face-down in the gravy. It takes a good detective to identify each mouthful, searching out the poisonous mushroom, lining up the hare, the pheasant and the venison on the side of his plate and choosing which to dispose of first. It's sometimes topped with a layer of intellectual puffery, decorated with curlicues and whirligigs of pastry decoration, but the contents is generally fairly predictable, with the occasional switch to partridge or rabbit for a faux originality.

Custard pies are filled with aerosol cream. They deflate in minutes and simply aren't funny any more. Cow pies are Westerns, of course.

Pork pie is the heavyweight, the staid, the intellectual. It comes with a medal sealed around its neck, a first prizewinner at a show, for its weight, its appearance, its golden-brown importance. The judges didn't taste it, though. They didn't want to cut the crust, to burst the bubble, to admit that this pie tasted at bottom like every other. Its hot-water crust is architectural in the stability of its structure; once moulded, it will stand alone, unfilled. The pork is legendary in its use of every part, the brain, the eyes, the tail, the brawn - all but the squeak - and it is layered with chunks of politically correct pink veal. A tasty jelly has been poured around the whole, uniting theme and plot, filling every space, excluding the air. It's a heavy dish. You wouldn't want more than a little slice at a time.

The king of pies must be a steak-and-kidney. It appears honest in its simplicity, smooth on top, slightly scalloped around its sealed edges by the clean-nailed hands of an expert cook, supported in the centre by a pottery blackbird, representative, allusive, legendary, handed down by generations. Break the pastry open and it is thick enough not to maze into countless brittle fragments. Then that scent rises and you know you are in the hands of a master-chef. The balance is right, the mix is honest, nutritious, memorable. The kidney adds iron to the amalgamation; the steak is from firm, free, well-muscled, grass-fed cows. There is no extraneous fat, but sometimes there might be an unexpected mushroom to roll around one's tongue, and a silken slide of shallots. The gravy is the key. It differentiates one cook from another, but they all have in common their hatred of synthetic powders and granules. They'd rather use a good beef stock, where bones have been roasted overnight in a low oven
until richly brown, and then simmered for days in a stockpot of water and wine, with carrots, peppercorns, onions and added tasty unexpected leftovers, so good that the ingredients are imperceptible. The whole is sealed, baked, perfect - an entire meal in one dish. You might not need to eat again for some time.

Sweeping generalizations about pie preferences are almost as invalid as those about books, or sex, or music. In the end it comes down to individual taste.

Do you like pie?