Ahoy all!
When there is nothing better to do on a rainy Sunday, stay at home and bake something exotic. So, for all of you that are heading to a big family dinner this evening, I have a secret recipe that will blow your grannies socks off - The Australian Meat Pie! Australians eat 260 million meat pies each year, which equals about 13 pies each.
You want to know more about meat pies?! Okay then, a little history…
Pastry was invented by the Greeks around the 2nd century BC, and when the Romans showed up for dinner they stole the recipe. The Romans told everyone about the recipe, and as usual a lot of the information was lost in translation. Instead of beef, the English understood eel. And when 1350 AD came around King Charles V of France thought the meat pies should be filled with dancing women and jugglers. The English were so jealous of this new French meat pie development that they tried to one-up their competition in the 17th century by having human dwarfs and birds jump out of the pie and sing this nursery rhyme:
Sing a song of sixpence,
a pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
the birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
to set before the king?
The king was in his counting house,
counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlour,
eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
and pecked off her nose!
There was such a commotion
that little Jenny wren
Flew down into the garden
and put it back again
Then a lot happened over the Victorian era to mess up the original meat pie recipe altogether; they started calling it shepherd’s pie and cottage pie. But thankfully, some English folk escaped with a good recipe to Australia during the colonization period. In 1948 L.T. McLure baked his famous “Four n’ Twenty” meat pies for the Royal Melbourne Show. They were such a hit that he opened a factory baking 50,000 meat pies per hour, making him Master of Meat Pies. The meat pie is now a national Australian treasure; to be eaten with Ketchup while watching the footy. Bye-bye, American pie!
Thank you, thank you.
1 comment so far Click to reply »
March 2nd, 2009
Yes, we’ve got the basic ordinary ‘eat it at the football’ pie. And we also have a hundred flavours of gourmet meat pie… beef and mushroom, beef and potato, chicken and mushroom, chicken and vege, etc. etc.
The most famous pie place is ‘Harry’s Cafe de Wheels’ that started as a 24 hours food stand outside the navy base on Sydney harbour. 60 years later it is still a 24 hour food stand outside the navy base, but most customers are late night party people and tourists. Oh, and they have a franchise too. So now you can get Harry’s pie with peas and mashed potato in your local shopping centre food court. Plus something called ‘mobile catering’. It’s not natural! Has Harry sold out to commercialism?
http://www.harryscafedewheels.com.au/Home.aspx?element=1&category=1