| The story of Bernard's search for the perfect English pork pie reached international news when noted Sydney journalist Eric Shackle wrote in the New York webzine "Consumer Chef" an article on pies and covered Bernard's exploits. This article can be read on Eric's e-book on the following link. |
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Bernard's Famous Pork Pies
Background.
The one of the things that I miss most about England is a Pork Pie of the Melton Mowbray variety. When we went to UK in 1992, I stated that I could get off the aircraft eat a pork pie and then return to NZ a very happy person. Well I ate a PP almost every day I was there (5 weeks). Faye decided that she had better join in too and also became addicted. We also rekindled the taste for 'scratchin's' and 'faggots'.
On my return to NZ I sampled every PP available in the delicatessens and failed to find any resemblance to the real thing. Bakers here cater to the taste of the New Zealander (naturally) and the thought of a cold meat pie horrifies the Kiwi, and heating up an English PP melts the jelly and results in a soggy pie, so Kiwi PPs don't have jelly or the necessary pork fat, they also mince the pork which doesn't give the right texture.. The only thing for it was to make my own. The search of recipe books commenced, I had a recipe in an old cook book which was my Mom's (Modern Cookery Illustrated published in the 1930s) and I found a cook book called 'Traditional British Cooking by Audrey Ellis first published in 1979'.
The latter seemed to be the nearest thing to the Pie I wanted, but the pastry was like concrete. I preferred to use a baking tin rather than mould the pastry around my fist as they did in the early home cooking days. I used muffin tins as they are about the correct depth and close to the shape. The problem with the tin is that the juices of the pie run out and run between the pastry and the tin. The result is a high percentage of pies stuck in the tin. After experimenting with the various tins, fist molding, ingredients, spices, dicing of the pork, and quantities of ingredients in the pastry, I discovered that the book 'Traditional British Cooking' had converted Imperial measure to metric incorrectly, I had not checked this before......Am I a dumb bunny or what? I also put a call out over the net newsgroups for any help on the technical aspect of making them. I received 3 good replies, I then put all recipes into a spreadsheet and compared them (including my own and the Cook Books) I also baked them all individually.
So with what I learnt by my mistakes and experiments, plus the analysis of the combined recipes I came up with an English Pork Pie made by me in New Zealand. (After nearly eight years, on and off, fiddling around)
UPDATE 23 September 2007
I have now updated the recipe and the technique; yes I have thrown away the slide rule the spreadsheet. I have developed the right measures to suit my pie. The result has proven to be simpler, faster to make and consistent - at last I am happy after all these years.
If you try it I hope you like the result, if you have a better recipe and method, or you can give some ideas on enhancing the recipe, pleeeeeez e-mail me... and as cousins Roger and John would say....Bon Appetite!
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