How Pie and Mash Killed Itself

Why protected status won’t save pie and mash in London, by Jonathan Nunn.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week’s article is a new version of a previously paywalled article by Jonathan Nunn, updated in response to the recent attempt to gain protection status for the traditional London dish of pie and mash.

Also a reminder that our selection of six art prints made in collaboration with illustrator Sing Yun Lee and photographer Michaël Protin are now available to buy via our website. We hope that you find something that you love.

British-Chinese Takeaway Still Life, by Sing Yun Lee

Molesey Fish Bar, by Michaël Protin

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How Pie and Mash Killed Itself

Why protected status won’t save pie and mash in London, by Jonathan Nunn.

The moment before eating pie and mash, in between the plate hitting the Formica and the first spoonful, my dad closes his eyes. He remembers the cluttered chat of a full pie and mash shop, the whetstone of quick banter between old boys and harried staff, accents full of dropped aitches. He remembers his parents, and perhaps, once he’s pierced the lid of pastry and spilled its contents out into the mash smeared as a buttress onto the side of the plate, he reflects that he is probably about the same age now as the people in his memories.

Food always has a function of remembrance; every day in London millions of people who were born outside the UK sit down to eat dishes that connect them to another country. My dad, however, is a migrant of time. London pie and mash shops are still alive and kicking, just about. You can still find at least one in most of London’s eastern and south-eastern boroughs, order a double pie, double mash, and get it within seconds. That isn’t quite the point though. What my dad is really searching for is not a lost taste, or a lost country, but a lost London – the London of his childhood.

Recently, I texted my dad to tell him that Richard Holden, the Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay, was leading a parliamentary debate in order to give ‘traditional pie and mash’ protected status, putting it on the same level as a Melton Mowbray pie or a Cumberland sausage. I told him I thought it was stupid. He texted back, ‘why?’

How long have you got? Leaving aside the fact that the entire purpose of this exercise was to drum up publicity for Basildon’s two pie and mash shops, it seems to me that trying to preserve pie and mash exactly as it was is the precise reason it’s dying out in London. Pie and mash shops themselves were once insurgent, invented in the 1840s and staffed over the subsequent decades by Italian immigrants from Ravello, replacing the London tradition of hot pie sellers on the street (‘What has become of the pieman?’ George Dodd lamented in his 1856 book The Food of London). Yet today, newspapers are full of the same laments, all claiming that London’s pie and mash shops are being pushed out by wider forces beyond their control: the rising cost of housing, gentrification, displacement. It’s a food on the verge of extinction.

Here’s the problem though: it’s just not true.

The major reason pie and mash is fading in London, is because it doesn’t appeal to most Londoners anymore. For the uninitiated, pie and mash is not merely a pie and mashed potato. It is a whole set of rules and aesthetics that have stayed unchanged for generations. Here is what pie and mash is: it is a meat pie in a suet crust; it is boiled mashed potato sans butter, sans seasoning, sans anything; it is, most of all, parsley liquor, Kermit-green and thickened with eel juice and flour. It is the perfunctory ordering system (double, double); it is a fork and spoon and never a knife, even though there are knives provided; it is chilli vinegar; it is a potential but not obligatory side of stewed or jellied eels; it is Formica tables and cold tiles; it is the family name of the shop owner in gold lettering on the door; it is London, and it is a London that is fading.

It’s also – and this is just my opinion – not delicious. All articles, all YouTube videos which parachute in an incredulous American to talk about ‘LONDON’S OLDEST PIE AND MASH SHOP’, have to tip-toe around this undeniable fact in fear of denigrating a traditional ‘working-class food’. It’s not the mucilaginous texture of the liquor, something I actually quite like and which – along with the dumpling-esque condiment of chilli vinegar – makes me question why Londoners ever had any problem with Cantonese food. It’s not even like it’s actively bad. With the exception of jellied eels – which are objectively the vilest preparation of eel you could ever devise – the sin of pie and mash is its blandness. It takes two things that are, on paper, uncontroversially delicious and ruins them by claiming that putting butter on the mash is ‘against the rules’ or some equally absurd arbitration more suited to a Victorian workhouse than a twenty-first-century food business.

Still, to eat pie and mash is to be a Londoner, and so I eat pie and mash. I will post photos of it to Instagram to prove it. I have it about once a year, to check it’s still there, in the same way I might check on a benign lump. I want it to be good, and every time I have it I’m surprised that it’s (still) not. And I’m always struck by how little would need to be done to make it better.

In James Hansen’s article on pie and mash for Taste in 2018, he quotes Joe Cooke, the owner of the pie and mash shop F. Cooke in Hoxton, who says, ‘It hasn’t altered, it won’t alter.’ Hansen goes on to write;

‘Pie and mash’s slow marginalization can also be put down to a tyrannical, paralyzing illogic of authenticity and myth-making that says things must be this way. Pie and mash’s willful steadfastness is both its lifeblood and its death knell. Regulars cherish and protect the unchanging rules: in the wider world, they are pasteurized into mythic, “authentic,” historical conceit. Their myths – whether or not you have mash, how the liquor is made, whether eels are stewed or jellied – are self-perpetuating but also an invention of distance.’

For me, the unchanging nature of pie and mash is tied to a refusal to accept that London has changed. This is not to deny that many working-class Londoners who would have relied on pie and mash shops have been pushed out from their childhood homes. Of course, there are many newcomers to Hackney, to Peckham, to Bermondsey, who would never visit a pie and mash shop, but would spend three times as much money on a frozen Willy’s Pie, or ten times as much on a pie from St. John. But the story isn’t this simple. A lot of what gets called the ‘white working-class’ willingly moved out of London because the demographics were becoming less white. Outside the East London hipster stereotype, there is still a working-class in Cockney heartlands – in Bow, in Whitechapel, in Dagenham, in Romford – they just happen to not all be white. Pie and mash shops could and should have adapted to bring this demographic in. They could have ensured their survival by instilling a new generation with some sense of ownership over it. Instead, they have chosen to become ossified.

I see the self-inflicted wound that is the decline of pie and mash as a parallel to what has happened with the black-cab industry. The arcana surrounding it – The Knowledge – makes no sense in a modern world, yet it has been held on to, not just for tradition’s sake, but to make the job exclusive. The cab industry has been hollowed out by Uber, and yet Uber also provided immigrant drivers with an ‘in’ to a business that had been fenced off to them. It also provided a sense of fairness for many users – particularly Black customers – who previously had to play roulette regarding whether a cab would pick them up or not. I think of what Bob Cooke, another pie and mash shop owner, told the Financial Times: ‘There are no East Enders here now,’ as if no one is born in the East End anymore.

Pie and mash too will die or move to Essex. When I was last in Southend, I counted four pie and mash shops in a few blocks, which must be 100 or so times more shops per capita than any area in London. Pie and mash is not dying; it has tactically retreated. Perhaps this is why Holden’s push for protection is a clever gambit, for Essex at least – to position it as the true keepers and inheritors of London’s food culture, just like Taiwan did to mainland China (the protection, cannily, is not for a place but for the ‘Cockney diaspora’). London, meanwhile, has moved on. What relevance does pie and mash have to a city whose river no longer teems with eels, to a city that discovered the food of other cultures a few decades ago and decided that, actually, it quite likes them? What is indigenous about eels imported from Holland, about parsley proudly declared by Joe Cooke to be ‘English parsley’, before he then admits that it’s Spanish.

I have no interest in protecting pie and mash. It is now of another time and another place that is not mine, and there will be other things that will flourish in its absence. And like my dad, like anyone who loves a city, I too will eventually have that sense of my world fading away, and have to choose whether to accept it gracefully. I sometimes text him when another pie and mash shop has closed, part regretfully, partly to annoy him. Yet in truth, he eats pie and mash even less than I do; he has found new comfort foods. He will shake his head, mutter something about it being ‘a shame’, and dig into a takeaway container of ackee and saltfish, this time eyes open.

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Credits

Jonathan Nunn is a food and city writer from London, and the founding editor of Vittles.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

An additional thanks to Ruby Tandoh, particularly for her introduction to George Dodd’s The Food of London.