Ground Hog Day 2014 is over and I emerge from my blogging hibernation to announce that this is the Winter of Pie. Not the “American as” apple pie or the cherry pie that is the test of Billy Boy’s girlfriends, or the slutty “easy as” pie. No, none of these. Rather the savoury pie.
Admittedly it has an unsavoury past. Before ovens wore burnished steel and were obligingly self-cleaning, meats were baked in inedible pastry “coffyns” that were re-used. I told you it was unsavoury. This is the sort of pie from which four and 20 blackbirds would sing. There are reports of coffyns filled with live frogs being brought to the table. In a discarded novel called Warts and All, Jane Austen says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman must subsist on frog pie if she is ever to skewer a prince” . . . OK, I made that bit up, but the rest is true.
For such a feeble joke I might be made to eat humble pie, which is a corruption of “umble” pie. “Umbles” are the offal of deer. Where else could you learn these things?
The Winter of Pie has been thrown off course sporadically by Christmas and the traditional yule tide power outage, and sundry other shocks that we are all heir to. The first pie is pictured above. It’s ham, cheese and leek. Since then I’ve made a beef and olive pie - my sun dried olives were a little too powerful. A pork and prune pie with apple mash was moving. Spiced lamb with beans topped with mash was pleasing, but the best to date was Moroccan lamb with apricots. Harissa spice was a wonderful counterpoint to the sweetness of the meat and fruit, while the puff pastry topping made it truly decadent. These are all to be found in Sophie Conran’s Mini Book of Pies.
This winter feels as if it’s been February since December. What I wouldn’t do for a coffyn full of crocuses singing spring. I think I’ll fill the hot water bottle again and ponder my next pie.
A Bounty of Books
I’ve done a lot of reading in the last year, even embarked on e-reading at last, but I’ll just mention these three. In Josephine Tey’s To Love and Be Wise the nuances of the characters’ feelings reminded me of George Elliot, and the unconventional plot will keep you guessing.
I cite the next two because they are fun in and of themselves and brought to my attention a whole range of books that would otherwise have escaped my notice. Nick Hornby’s Polysyllabic Spree is a sort of reader’s diary. He discusses what he’s bought, what he’s read and thought, and not read and why. If you are a bibliophile you will probably laugh out loud or at the very least smile in recognition. Have you ever bought a book knowing you would never read it, but wishing that you were the sort of person who would? Me too.
Hornby directed me to John Carey’s Pure Pleasure, which is his must reads from the last century, it includes novels, poetry and non fiction. As a result, my Collected Auden is beside my bed, two or three poems a night, and so to sleep, hot water bottle still at my feet.
