For many of us, Christmas Day breakfast is a strictly traditional affair. It starts at 7am, riffling through selection boxes with a glass of sherry, prosecco or a 7% IPA, which, due to a growing queasiness, means you then forget to eat until 10am, when – by then panicking that you need to be at your mum’s in two hours – you bolt down a bacon sandwich, as ballast.
In the Midlands, however, they do things differently. Those keen to uphold ancient regional habits (DH Lawrence was a fan, apparently), opt for pork pie for breakfast. Explanations as to where this tradition originates vary. Was the pork pie originally sustenance for the gentry’s festive hunt? Or an annual treat for farm workers? Either way, each of the Midlands’ counties claims the Christmas pork pie as its own, which may well shock northerners. Not only is there a proud pork pie culture in Yorkshire (admittedly, a county that claims ownership of everything), but, in 2015, a survey by the manufacturer Pork Farms found that more than 60% of British adults enjoy a pork pie at some point over the festive season, and that consumption is highest in the north-west.
The Christmas pork pie, it transpires, is a truly national institution. Hence the wide availability of pies with seasonal seasonings and (time to amend your Christmas list) personalised messages. But of more importance to How to Eat (HTE) – the series analysing how to serve Britain’s favourite dishes – is how is a pork pie best enjoyed?
Hot or cold?
You may be shocked that HTE is asking that question, but the pork pie is open to greater interpretation than most realise. Several makers sell pies recommended for reheating. It is big thing in Yorkshire, where one manufacturer is even pushing pork pies as a replacement for turkey in your Christmas dinner. Notably, some firms forgo the pork pie’s traditional jelly, too – in case your principal and entirely reasonable justification for not reheating a pork pie would be disgust at the idea of hot, sticky, jellified stock leaking out everywhere as you cut into it.
That aside, while a pork pie should definitely be served at room temperature rather than fridge-cold, so that its flavours can sing, there seems something deeply incongruent about hot pork pie. The rugged and “set” solidity of a cold pie’s filling, the waxy coolness of its pastry and the sparky clarity of its seasonings (which change radically when heat is applied) are, surely, key to its appeal.
Ultimately, hot pork pie just feels wrong.
Augmentation
It is not HTE’s job to consider how pork pies are made and the relative merits of pink extruded cured meat versus the reassuringly grey, hand-chopped pork of the classic Melton Mowbray. But it would be remiss not to comment on the many, varied and awful ways in which contemporary Britain (as it does with all foods) insists on putting its own “fun twist” on the pork pie.
Is it boredom? The tyrannical idea that all foods are in need of constant reinvention? Late capitalism’s death spasms? HTE does not know. But what it does know is that, while some essentially tried’n’tested toggling around traditional flavours is fine in a pork pie (for instance, adding a bit of bacon or swapping up the traditional salt and pepper seasoning to include sage or thyme), all other interventions can be plotted on a graph whose axes are marked “superfluous” and “actively damaging”.
The vogue for adding dried or alcohol-soaked fruit to the mix, fresh apple, prunes, apricots, chillies and such, or topping the pies with onion marmalade or chopped plums, is bizarre. Not because those flavours jar per se – although some do – but because you, the consumer, are perfectly capable of adding those flavours as accompaniments, mainly in the form of chutneys, and crucially in the quantities you wish, rather than having a manufacturer make that decision for you in ways that may throw your whole pork pie experience out of kilter.
The very plainness of pork pie is core to its appeal. You know what you are getting: pork robustly seasoned but within tight parameters. You then augment that to your personal taste. Flavoured pies turn that ideal of free, democratic choice into a dictatorship by self-appointed gourmets. No one wants that.
This orgy of frivolity and/or patronising top-down direction peaks at Christmas, when pork pies are awash with mace, port glazes, and chestnuts, stilton and (God spare us!) cranberry toppings. Undoubtedly, someone out there will be doing a “mulled” pork pie – as, one by one, all foods submit to this seasonal collective hysteria, this mulling madness of cloves, red wine, nutmeg and cinnamon.
Foods that taste fine in July do not need special treatment in December. The pork pie is already perfect.
Sides & sauces
A judicious sharp and/or sweet counterpoint dab of mustard; chutney (must not be overly sugar-laden; apricot and chilli are barred – too bullying); or a grownup apple sauce are all perfectly acceptable. As it is Christmas, HTE will even call a truce on the use of that colonial throwback, brown sauce. Pickled onions are also good here, but please serve sweeter, smaller silverskin onions, rather than the kind of acrid pickled onions that, like spirit vinegar-derived napalm, leave scorched palates in their wake.
Beyond that, however, things get more complicated. If you are eating a large slice of pork pie, a little red cabbage, a tangled mound of pickled cucumber and, particularly, a few slices of pickled beetroot can be a wonderful thing. When that starts to develop into a salad, however, be it a plain English summer one, dressed leaves or something chi-chi involving fennel and goat’s cheese, then, invariably, the proportions get all out of whack.
The pork pie should be the dominant flavour here, any sides and sauces a spritz of flavour at its edges. If you are munching mulchy mouthfuls of leaves, the pork pie lost deep in that mix, then this has all gone very wrong. Likewise, if you are alternatively eating mouthfuls of artery-clogging pie and cleansing salad, that strikes HTE as a rather joyless trudge. The flavours on your plate should naturally meld together in a satisfying way.
It would be cavalier – nay, outrageous – to pair a hot side with cold pie – don’t cross the streams! – but, in the hot pie realm, there are those who would turn this into a full pie meal, with chips, beans or mushy peas, and gravy. This seems perverse. The pork pie is a self-contained portable cold snack, and there is a whole world of pies out there much better suited to the pie-meal-milieu. Why try to shoehorn the pork pie in?
When
With all due respect to the east Midlands, pork pie strikes HTE as a problematically stodgy breakfast. No, the pork pie is a lunch dish, a pub snack or – particularly over Christmas – the centrepiece of a “picky tea” (served alongside cheese in a kind of improvised ploughman’s), when you have had a gutful of overly rich, sweet and sticky foods, and you need something refreshingly cold that you can pick at, piecemeal, at your own pace.
Ironically, in 1644, Oliver Cromwell banned pies at Christmas as part of a puritanical campaign against gluttony. Now a pork pie seems like a relatively spartan relief, a welcome timeout from the usual Christmas stuffing.
Serving
As with cheese, there is something deeply aesthetically and texturally pleasing about a pork pie served on a wooden board. It looks fittingly rustic, homely even. It implies the warmth of hearths and pub snugs, despite this being a cold dish. Moreover, that slight, almost imperceptible yielding as your sharp knife cuts through to the soft wood is deeply satisfying.
If sharing a large pie from a wooden platter, you will also require plates and a sharp knife for divvying up the pie, and a butter knife each for applying the chutneys and sauces. Then use your hands. You want to feel pie between your fingers. This is not a knife and fork meal. There is no need to stand on ceremony.
Drink
A mug of rusty tea: the sturdy, tannic foundation for such savoury heft (and the harbinger of a welcome alcohol-free night in the Christmas ethanol whirlwind). Alternatively, if you are still bang on it, beer. Nothing too dramatic. Savour those highwire double IPAs on their own. Instead, choose a crisply bitter pale ale or one of those new-wave English bitters with real depth and body, whose toffee-ish qualities are nonetheless leavened by a truckload of expressive hops.
So pork pie, how do you eat yours?
