If You Have a Deep Obsessive Love for Pies, You Are Not Alone

Because they speak to what it means to be human

To celebrate the launch of The Sauce (formerly The Capsule Pantry), I’m releasing a series of paywall-free articles over the next week or so, so you can see what sort of content to expect from us.

Today, we’re talking pie. After all, March 14th is Pi day.

Medium asked me to come up with something pie-related to celebrate, and this was my response. A love letter to the worldwide obsession with filled carbohydrate pockets.

Today’s article is paywall-free but if you want the full Saucy experience, you can join for $5 a month or $50 a year which gives you access to absolutely everything, from articles to recipes, to discounts off my remote wine consulting service.

At 2.30 am, the bola — a Portuguese masterpiece of meat-filled pastry — came out of the wine bar kitchen.

By 2.33 am, the 10 hungry stragglers left in the bar had all but devoured every part of the pie. You could hear the satisfied murmurs around the table. Slightly tipsy revelers happy as, well, pie.

I’ll admit, I was a bit surprised at the reverence the bola receives amongst my Portuguese friends. This isn’t Britain — my homeland — where our love for pies is practically built into our DNA. This isn’t the US where apple pie is essentially a byword for being American.

But that’s the thing about pie. Almost every single country around the world has its own version. I should know, I’ve been documenting them because I’m considering a potentially madness-inducing project to cook all of them.

195 countries, 195 pies.

Almost wherever you live, pies are part of life. They’ve even taken over the English language.

Easy as pie. Eating humble pie. Pie-eyed (my father’s preferred phrase for drunk people).

Pies are so embedded into so many cultures that you could almost say they define humanity itself.

In other words, to eat pie is to be human.

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To be British means to love pies more than most. The most telling stat of all is that 75% of Brits eat at least one pie a week.

And I don’t know a single Brit who hasn’t ended up in an argument about what constitutes a pie.

If you’re from the north, pies are pastry-encased chunks of meat in gravy.

In the Midlands, it’s the pork pie — a hot water and lard crust that tightly covers chopped pork and fat.

In the south — especially around London — it’s pie, mash, and liquor aka a meat pie, mashed potato, and parsley sauce.

And we all eat mince pies at Christmas.

There also won’t be a Brit in the world who doesn’t believe that “pies” favoured by gastropubs — meat stews topped with a puff pastry lid — are an insult to the world of pie. We believe this so deeply that over 5000 people once signed a petition in an attempt to enshrine the definition of a pie in law:

This petition urges the implementation of criminal sanctions upon the owners of food outlets that serve items described as pies without a pastry base. Exemptions will apply for Shepherds, Cottage and fish pies.

Growing up, pies were a culinary fixture. My mother’s Shepherd’s pie made a frequent Sunday lunch appearance. One of my early boyfriends was obsessed with “hunter” pies from our local butchers — a pie layered with pork, chicken and stuffing. His family placed one on the table almost every time I ate with them.

Then there was a concoction made up by my local elementary school — the potato and cheese pie. Mashed potato mixed with cheese and baked in the oven. Not really a pie and certainly not a culinary masterpiece but to my seven-year-old palate, it was as close to heaven on earth as I was going to get. So much so, it still lives rent-free in my head over 30 years later.

And whilst pies are often considered a home dining thing, they are increasingly making up a big part of Cozycore dining establishments. Restaurants that take the comfort of home cooking, eating and drinking and level it up into something worthy of a Michelin star or two.

Anyone who has tried — or simply seen on Instagram — Calum Franklin’s pies at the Holborn Dining Room in London will know what I mean.

We are a nation obsessed.

And we’re not the only ones. America has a stranglehold on pies almost as much as Brits do.

Even if they look entirely different from ours.

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It may come as a surprise to Americans but few of us Brits believe pies to be sweet. Maybe cherry or apple but even then, they must have a pastry lid. Otherwise, like that petition said, we will not believe it to be a pie.

But taking our weird obsession with pastry lids out of the equation (for the sake of transatlantic harmony, I will acquiesce that American pies do not have to posess one), I’m fascinated by the American obsession with sweet pies.

Growing up I longed to sit in an American diner whilst a waiter reels off a seemingly endless list of pie flavours.

Cherry. Apple. Pumpkin. Blueberry. Peach. Pecan. Key Lime.

I wanted to visit Twin Peaks and eat cherry pie at the Double R Diner. I wanted to find out what Possum pie tastes like (I assume better than it sounds).

Unfortunately, when I did visit the US in my early twenties I chose a crappy roadside diner whose pie selection was nothing like those of my dreams. But still, you can’t go that wrong with apple pie, even in the bad joints.

America might take their pie regionality and traditions even further than us Brits. There isn’t a pie in this list of American regional specialities that doesn’t make use of local ingredients.

Ohio Shaker lemon pie. New York grape pie made with Finger Lake Concord grapes. If there’s a local fruit, it will at some point find itself baked into an American pie.

The reason why American pies morphed into sweet concoctions — when it was the Brits who originally brought savoury pies to their colonies — has stumped many food historians. But one theory is that in the 1800s, sugar became an everyday staple thanks to sugar refining factories that popped up across the American South.

What was once a luxury was now cheap and commonplace, so the American pie was born.

And with it a nation of pie-obsessed individuals that almost rivals my own.

Or indeed, 195 other countries across the world.

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Pies are a testament to the human desire for exploration — they don’t sit still.

The American apple pie comes from Britain.

The origins of the Canadian Tourtière are rooted in French cooking.

The Indian Samosa morphed from Middle Eastern pies.

There are few foodstuffs with such a huge history and even fewer that will rouse enough passion in thousands of people to petition for protected pie status.

But almost everywhere where there are humans, there are pies. Pockets of carbohydrates filled with whatever the local land provides will forever be linked with humanity.

The actual definition of a pie doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is that they exist. That they fill empty stomachs in Portugal at 2.30 am on a cold, wet night.

That they give food writers like me the bonkers idea of making 195 of them as a project (maybe).

That they remind you of wherever you call home.

And with that, I’m off to make a chicken pie for dinner. It turns out it’s impossible think about pies for as long as I have today without busting out the pastry.

Again and again and again.

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