Eyes on the pies

A day in the field isn’t complete without some form of pastry-cased deliciousness but how did the pie become such a sporting staple?

- Written by Sam Rickitt

NO BRITISH event or sporting day is complete without a pie: whether traditional pork, savoury steak and Stilton or sweet apple. I have always hankered after them, from Ribby’s pie of mouse and bacon in Beatrix Potter to pigeon pie in The Railway Children, in which Peter cried ‘perfectly ripping’ when he thought it was being proffered for breakfast. Then there was Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory with the unfortunate Violet Beauregarde and her blueberry pie chewing gum, and studying Great Expectations when Pip steals brandy and a pork pie for Magwitch; not forgetting a recipe for apple pie by Geoffrey Chaucer. Perhaps it comes as little surprise, then, that at school my moniker was ‘Jocky’: not for my similarity of build to Frankie Dettori but after darts legend Jocky Wilson, as multiple hot beef and onion pies from the local butcher fuelled my exploits on the rugby field.

The history of this appetising morsel is as long as the choice of fillings is varied: the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians made filled pastry and flatbreads. The medieval Latin for ‘meat or fish enclosed in pastry’ appears in Britain around 1300, and the first English cookbook containing a recipe for pies was compiled by the cooks of Richard II in 1390. Although initially used to preserve cooked meat, pies gained popularity and featured as banquet centrepieces. Sugar from the New World gave rise to the sweet pie – Elizabeth I is said to have been served the first cherry pie – and as ovens became commonplace baked pies with rich, meaty sauces established themselves as the norm. An early venison pie recipe from 1660 bids budding cooks ‘if you bake it to eat hot… liquor it with claret wine and good butter’.