In Praise Of The Pie

Sun Herald

Sunday April 16, 2006

Paul Connolly

It may not be the healthiest fare but on a cold day at the football - or even on a large white plate - nothing beats a meat pie. Paul Connolly takes a bite out of an Aussie icon.

In summer, when the tourist hordes descend on the beach town of Ocean Grove in Victoria, Luke Jacimovic can look up to see dozens of faces pressed against the large window that separates his work space from the street. After 13 years working at the Rolling Pin Pie & Cake Shop, he's used to it. Besides, he knows they're not looking at him. They're watching, with fascination and more than a hint of salivation, an Australian icon - the meat pie - being created from scratch. "They love watching them get made," says Jacimovic, rolling out a sheet of pastry and pressing it into half-a-dozen trays of square moulds that he'll soon fill with steaming mince. "But I think they prefer eating them."

Jacimovic is almost definitely right. The humble meat pie has long held a venerated position in the Aussie hall of fame. Whether it's the chunky steak version favoured in Queensland, the mince-filled variety preferred in Victoria and NSW or the pie floater (a meat pie in split-pea soup) beloved of South Australians, there's a strong case for arguing that it's our national dish. Between supermarkets, bakeries, sporting arenas and school tuckshops, we eat an estimated 240 million pies every year.

And how we eat them is a story in itself. Some of us attack them conventionally, with a bite amidships. Some punch a hole in the puffy pastry on top and inject liberal doses of tomato sauce before tucking in, while others pop the lid like the hood of a car and scoff that down before sampling the rich gravy and meat inside. Former tennis champion Pat Rafter is said to slip a pie between slices of bread, creating a most unusual sandwich.

But the pie, in recent years, has had more than a few fingers thrust into the mix. In 1995, for instance, American multinational Simplot horrified Victorians when it bought Four'N Twenty pies, a pillar of a pie company that began life in 1947 in a small Bendigo bakery. Almost worse, Simplot sold Four'N Twenty back to Australia (Gippsland-based Patties Foods was the buyer) eight years later, claiming meat pies were out of fashion. If that wasn't vexing enough, studies released by the Australian Consumers' Association (ACA) in 2002 showed us what's inside our tasty icons (see box) and the results were as ugly as, well, a dropped meat pie.

Meanwhile, the pie has been marginalised as a wise food choice, what with the lobbying for healthier diets now that our collective bum is finding standard airline seating a bit of a squeeze. Even those slight of build are being steered away from

the snack, which the ACA study found contained an average of 15 to 35 grams of fat and 20 to 40 per cent of an adult's daily recommended sodium intake. In February, NSW jockeys were in shock when chief steward Ray Murrihy announced that meat pies would be banned from their rooms at metropolitan racetracks. "There's not much nutritional value in a pie," he said. "You don't see trays of hot pies being run out at half-time at a Sydney Swans game or at an NRL game."

Nevertheless, the humble pie remains popular. When a Roy Morgan Poll, released in January, asked Australians what they liked to eat, it found 52 per cent of Australians like pies, a figure that was above hamburgers (50 per cent) but below barbecued chicken (69 per cent) and, curiously, salad (72 per cent). The reason for the pie's enduring appeal has much to do with the fact that, good or bad, pies simply taste great - particularly, if I may add, on a cold, windswept hill at the football. But it

also has something to do with the reinvention and reinterpretation of the pie in line with our increasingly sophisticated tastebuds.

Where once you might have followed your sausage roll entree with a meat pie, a steak and onion pie or, if you were female or confident of your masculinity, a pastie, now there are countless variations available. A brief sample might include curry pies, beef stroganoff pies, beef and burgundy pies, Thai chicken pies, game pies (kangaroo, emu, camel or crocodile, anyone?) and prawn pies.

But pies can also be found in the domain of white linen tablecloths and moon-sized plates. Melbourne's La Luna Bistro, for example, offers a rabbit, spinach and pine nut filo-pastry pie for $17.50, while one in three diners at Sydney's The Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay orders its trademark $43 snapper pie, the ingredients of which include soubise, fish stock, snapper fillets and 30 millilitres of truffle oil.

"People love their comfort food and I think our snapper pie, like pies in general, is just that," says Boathouse executive chef Perry Hill. "We've elevated the pie a little but at the same time embraced it. No one should be afraid to put a pie on the menu."

At the Rolling Pin Pie & Cake Shop - which, in 2004, saw its $3.20 meat pie win top honours at the annual Great Aussie Meat Pie Competition - there are more than a dozen varieties of meat pie on offer. However, the tried and true plain meat pie (made with mince meat) is still the favourite.

It owes its history to rudimentary forms of the pie turned out in Ancient Greece (the pastry, being inedible, was used more as a vessel) before the Romans embraced it and took it on the road through Europe. Pies appeared in Britain in the 12th century (with the crust known as the coffyn) and variations soon abounded, including the fish pie (popular during Lent), the shepherd's pie, the steak and kidney pie and the Cornish pasty (as it's spelled in the UK), which was designed for Cornish tin miners. With meat up one end and jam down the other, it was lunch and dessert in the one package.

The pie arrived in Australia with the English. In the 1900s, pie men, operating on street corners, would sell their wares from tin boxes warmed by small charcoal stoves. Bicycles, horse-drawn carriages and, later, utes helped spread the meat pie gospel.

In the mid-1950s, the pie's place as an emerging Australian icon was referenced, however tongue in cheek, by a 19-year-old Barry Humphries, who exhibited some unusual artwork in a Flinders Street theatre. Fronting collages made entirely from meat pies, Humphries opened his exhibition, Pie-scape, by pouring a bottle of tomato sauce over his head and proclaiming, "This is Australia's national drink."

By the 1960s, pies were being mass-produced and their popularity peaked in the '70s. But the arrival of American chains such as McDonald's changed Australia's fast-food landscape forever.

Still, the pie has its niche. According to John Ross, its national organiser, the Great Aussie Meat Pie Competition last year received more than 1500 entries, 60 per cent of which were in the gourmet category. According to Ross and his judges - who receive pies from entrants ranging from small country bakeries to mass manufacturers from all over Australia - a good pie should rate well in regards to the thickness of the pie bottom, its lamination and its ingredients. In other words, the base shouldn't be much more than two millimetres thick, it shouldn't fall apart or hemorrhage when you bite into it, it should have an even golden bake and a "lifting and separation of the puff pastry on top" and there shouldn't be a hint of gristle.

"It's not rocket science," adds Ross, who says he has been eating meat pies all his life. But then, Ross makes a shocking admission, which may well have the Un-Australian Activities Task Force knocking on his door. "To be honest, while I love meat pies, I actually prefer sausage rolls."

WHAT'S IN A PIE?

One indication of the meat

pie's status in Australia is that its content is governed by law - an honour not automatically afforded every foodstuff. According to the Food Standards Code, meat pies must contain at least 25 per cent meat, with the amount to be disclosed on the packaging.

However, the percentage of meat is measured by levels of protein. As an Australian Consumers' Association (ACA) study of supermarket frozen pies found in 2002, this means some pie makers supplement their filling with small to large amounts of textured vegetable protein and other non-meat solids. As for the definition of meat, well, the ACA reported that it can include buffalo, camel, deer, goat, hare, pig, poultry, rabbit and sheep, not to mention gristle and connective tissue. Anything,

in fact, except animal foetus.

John Ross, the national organiser of the Great Aussie Meat Pie Competition, says punters are better off buying their pies from bakeries. "Frozen supermarket pies tend to be made with a thicker base and may or may not contain choice ingredients," he says. "The version you get from bakeries, even ones that sell mass-manufactured pies, are far superior. The price will tell you if a pie has got meat in

it. You simply can't put meat in a pie for $1."