Infamy!

Lightmancer

Lightmancer

Legend
Location
Sunny Frimley
Name
Bill Palmer
The Daily Mail is an extreme right wing tabloid newspaper in the UK that races enthusiastically to the bottom of any breaking story and employs eleven-year-olds to trawl social media in search of fillers for column inches.

We Want Plates is a Twitter account that shines a light on restaurants that think it is clever (let alone hygienic) to serve food on floorboards, shovels, clothes lines, etc.

National Pie Week is a celebration of all that is good and crusty.

Me? I am hanging my head in abject shame that a tweet of mine in response to the aforementioned We Want Plates bemoaning the abhorrent "top crust" - a disc of puff pastry on top of stew - has been seized upon and published by the Daily Mail.

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Commiserations at being published in the Daily Hate online, Bill. But I share your sentiments wholeheartedly. I was reading an article in the Grauniad about pies yesterday. It seems the proper pie is staging something of a comeback amongst the trendy types in That There London. In Herefordshire however we are in something of a pie desert, it being a county obsessed with serving big lumps of meat (preferably beef). Never mind, I hope to move back to the North West before long and reacquaint myself with the glorious Wrights meat & tater!
 
at first, I thought this was just Bill being Bill, but a bit of Googling tells me that the British love to debate about what constitutes a pie.

When is a pie not a pie? Mary Berry reignites food's greatest debate

No one should care what this American has to say about the "great British pie debate", but I'd say if it has the filling and some pastry, it's a pie. The bottom and the sides needn't be made of pastry.

We Americans certainly enjoy our pizza pies.....and they have no pastry ON TOP!....just the bottom
 
Stew with a biscuit on top, more like.

I actually blame Fray Bentos. My generation grew up on their pies in tins, with a disc of the most singularly disgusting "pastry" on top. You opened the pie with a tin opener and put it in an oven for a while. It was as vile as it sounds. It was impossible to cook thoroughly without cremating it, so you either had it black or rubbery-raw. Actually, most of the time it was both, since the difference between the two states was measured in nanoseconds. It was part of the "inedible" food group, alongside such delights as Vesta Chow Mein, Birds Angel Delight and Ski yogurt.

I should say that on the whole I detest puff pastry with a passion. Particularly cold, a la mille feiulle, which is one of the most pointless things known to man; the French culinary equivalent of an anti-personnel mine. Pastry should either be short crust, hot water crust or choux and that's all there is to it.

Don't get me started on pizza. How the same word can be used to encompass those obscene stuffed-crust manhole covers with perverse toppings like hoi-sin pepperoni, purveyed by Messrs. Dominos and Pizza Shed and the featherlight delights available on nearly every Neapolitan street corner is beyond me. There is a reason why I am a founder member of the "No pizza outside Italy" club.

Oh yes, pies are a matter of great import this side of the pond. My original tweet has now had twenty four and a half thousand hits...
 
when I was growing up and mom wanted a night off from cooking, these came out of the freezer and went into the oven for 50 minutes (or until edges are golden brown).

Even though it is not fine cuisine, having one of these brings comfort and warm memories.
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cdc3cf93125349e41d925a1f51820f75 by Luke, on Flickr
 
Bill, come on over and I'll take you a pizza tour of Milwaukee. Plenty of Italians settled here around the turn of the last century and we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to proper Neapolitan-style pizza.
 
Lightmancer said:
I actually blame Fray Bentos ... You opened the pie with a tin opener and put it in an oven for a while. .
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Or, like my uncle, you put it directly into the oven, having forgotten to remove the lid first. This would result in a colossal explosion some time later, which would destroy your cooker if you were lucky, or take out the kitchen wall too if you weren't.

-R
 
We really just need different words for Italian Pizza and American Pizza. The latter descended from the former and changed considerably. I did laugh at your chart, however, since Italian pasta probably descended from the land of "fake pasta" and has that in common with American pizza.
 
Have to say....best pie I had was in New Zealand. I wanted to take the chef back home to UK to show how it is done. Whilst on the subject of pies. Wigan is known as "Pie Town" and a Wigan Kebab is 4 or 5 pies on a stick!!!!

My Mum, bless her soul....made great pies. When asked for her secret she just told people she slammed the oven door.
 
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