OMG, I can’t believe I’ve posted 20 eN-Zeds without writing about pies. Apparently eN-Zedders eat more pies per square metre of land mass or per kilogram of pastry or something like that than any other country. If there were a Willy Webb-Ellis trophy for pie eating, there’d be no anxiety about eN-Zed winning it like many of us are experiencing this week, you know what I mean. They’d just give it to us.
We do have national pie competitions which is of course silly because judging pies is like judging people – so subjective and bound to end in tears. Mutton and potato pies, for example. Ik!
Making an awesome pie isn’t so difficult though. Make the base out of short pastry and the top from flaky pastry. Fill it with meat, chopped beef or minced meat-ish stuff, some carrots, onions or mushrooms. Brush the top with egg to make it look spanky posh when it comes out of the oven. Serve it fresh and with a big red gob of Watties. The important thing is that you eat it within an hour or so of it coming out of the oven.
Because pies consist of pastry, the fresher the pie the better it will be. Definitely don’t buy a three-day old pie that’s lived in a plastic wrapper inside a freezer for the last 12 months unless you’re at Lancaster Park on a day when a southerly is howling in which case buy two pies and put one in each pocket. After the game, discard. Definitely don’t buy a pie with a best-by date that’s six months away and definitely don’t buy a pie that has ‘Made in Australia’ written on the plastic wrapper.
There are posh pies, like Bluff Oyster and Chardonnay or Chicken, brie and cranberry or this one I saw in Balclutha… Muttonbird and Speights, ew! These are all posh excuses to charge a silly price – just as some cafés do with cup cakes. By the way, just calling your cake shop a café doesn’t give you licence to charge $20 for a custard square, no matter what twirly swirly butter-creamy caramelly things you put on the top. But wait, we’re talking about pies not pigs and lipstick.
Posh pies usually have fancy names based on three seductive-sounding ingredients, like scallop, whitebait and tarragon, and are served with a fancy serviette, in a recycled origami-esque cardboard box, and come with a big, fat juicy price tag. But come on eN-Zedders, the only things big and fat and juicy about a pie should be the pie and its eater. Pies aren’t posh. Pies are for crane-truck drivers – steak and mushroom, mince and cheese, bacon and egg, apple and blackberry… See? Two everyday eN-Zed ingredients, fresh and hot, in a brown paper bag. Did I mention fresh? And a gob of Watties, duh.
By the way, whatever happened to tearooms? Why are they all now cafés? Surely eN-Zed’s not gone all Frenchy croissanty and quichey, I mean… you know, there’s the opening game and that forward pass and that goose Chabal and… or is it that tea rooms can’t seduce us into paying silly prices, but cafés can? Come on eN-Zedders, let’s not be cheated out of our national treasure by the Frenchies and you know I’m talking about more than just pies now 🙂
eN-Zed 