Do you ever read the endorsements on the back of a book? I’ve started to, now finding them to be intriguing and often insightful. Form the back of this book, here are two:
“This book got me a girlfriend.”
“A strong contender for comfort food book of the year.”
This is a book by men, Tristan Hogg and Jon Simon, that I will say is targeted for men [and women] who want superior comfort food. And I readily imagine that if a single guy made one of these pies for his date, that woman would fall madly, happily in love with such a gifted man. The thought of decades of pie excellence is simply overwhelming.
This book is about gifts. Gifts of flavor and sustenance. Pie in Great Britain is the great comfort food. Here in America, the closest thing is probably meat loaf, but our dish — wonderful as it can be — simply palls with the grand British tradition of savory pie baking. It’s not just the crust either. It’s the contents.
Tristan and Jon met in the early 1990s, traveled around the world separately and together, and finally opened their first pie shop in Bristol in 2004. They have over a dozen stores now and are the only pie stall in London’s Borough Market, the greatest food hall in the world [yes, I’ve been to Paris and all over Italy and to Pike Market in Seattle and, and … Borough is the wonder].
The pies they offer us here are mostly meaty savory, although there are some vegetable only types and some sweet ones too. But this is meat territory. Here meat is showcased in dishes like:
Chicken and Butternut Squash Curry Pie
Deerstalker Pies
Easter Lamb Pie
Love Bunny Pie
Rabbit and Chorizo Pork Pie
Sausage, Cider and Potato Pie
Steak and Stilton Pie
Beef, pork, chicken, chorizo, sausage, lamb and rabbit appear on page after page. But these are not just meat-with-sauce-and-potato pies. Consider the Easter Lamb Pie. It includes onion, celery, garlic, white wine, bay, rosemary, thyme, lemon zest, anchovy fillets, artichokes, cherry tomatoes, and capers. Goodness, there is barely room for the lamb!
Tristan and Jon are pie fanatics and gourmands. You’ll look at these recipes and wonder which Parisian restaurant they came from. But they are the product of two young men of talent and imagination. They’ve taken the traditional British recipes and, let us admit, made some improvements.
Along the way, they’ve added in some curry or other spices. They’ve adopted Middle Eastern influences, like the Smoked Eggplant and Olive Strudel Pie made with phyllo. There’s a Lucky Ducky Pie where duck confit is mated with cabbage and pear.
Fortunately, many of the recipes are matched with full page photographs showing crust encasing some complex array of ingredients that you can almost smell, piping hot from the oven. The lads have included a two-page diagram on booze matching. What do you serve with a spring chicken pot pie? They suggest lager. And there are suggested pies here for lager, wheat beer, dry and sweet ciders, champagne, white and red wines, rose, and port [that would be the pear and chocolate pie — I told you not everything is savory].
The American pie experience is focused on dessert and those frozen chicken pot pies we succumb to. We have nothing in our national repertoire that begins to match the pie constellation of Great Britain. This lovely book by two pie masters is the perfect way to experience a great food tradition one crust at a time.
The picture at the bottom here is one of the individual Deerstalker Pies, made with both venison and cotechino sausage and amplified with carrots, celery, celeriac, bacon, chili, lentils, juniper berries, allspice, cinnamon, bay and tomato. Did I mention that Tristan and Jon were sophisticated? You’ll love Pieminister.
