Sausages and eggs, and hot and sour soup

[venta]

Many of you will know that I have strong feelings on the topic of pies. A pie should, in an ideal world, have a pastry top and a pastry bottom. The should both be made of shortcrust. However, I am a tolerant type and I'm perfectly happy for people to have puff pastry, or top-crust only pies, so long as the damn things are cooked in unison. The thing that some pubs server you - stew with a separate piece of puff pastry balanced in or near the vicinity - is not a pie. It might be tasty, it might be what you want, but it is not a pie. It is a stew-hat, and should be advertised as such.

Incidentally, someone recently introduced me to the phrase "stewpé"[*], with which I am most taken.

Today, for reasons of a lack of time and being crap at getting out of bed nature, I didn't pack myself lunch and went instead to EAT.

At lunchtime, EAT offers two different kinds of soup (plus complicated ramen/pho noodle soup pots of various kinds). I had today's "simple", which was sweet potato and chilli and very nice.

However, today's "bold", according to the menu, was chicken pot pie.

Err, that's clearly some kind of poor layout in the menu, because chicken pot pie is clearly not a soup.

Oh, but they think it is. Chicken soup, "garnished with a puff pastry lid".

I did not see anyone eating one of these egregious horrors.

[*] I'm not sure how clear that is written down. It's a portmanteau of "stew" and "toupé".

Comments

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I fear our local now does some quite egregious stewhats under the name of "pies".

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

What about things-that-aren't-pies because they lack a lid? Is there a pithy accepted term or ghastly neologism to cover those?

One doesn't often encounter them in pubs, but I must confess to cooking things like that myself. You can get by with "X in a pastry case", and I've been known to stretch the term 'quiche' to almost breaking point. If it has at least one egg in, it's a quiche, right?

Or is pie acceptable in that (pastry) case? I wouldn't expect a lid on most pudding pies, for example - e.g. lemon meringue, pumpkin or pecan. But an apple pie definitely wants a tasty pastry top. And if offered a "bean and tomato pie" I'd be rather crestfallen if it lacked a lid, but if I put a bean-and-tomato filling in a pastry case I'd be sorely tempted to call it that, unless it was shallow and unrunny enough to get away with calling it a tart.

To muddy the waters further, Wikipedia, which is obviously Correct on all matters, defines a quiche as a "Savoury pie" in the infobox for the Quiche article, but the Pie article insists that a pie is a dish with a "casing that covers or completely contains" the filling ... before contradicting itself when it addresses the question head-on with

"A filled pie (also single-crust or bottom-crust), has pastry lining the baking dish, and the filling is placed on top of the pastry but left open. A top-crust pie, which may also be called a cobbler, has the filling in the bottom of the dish and is covered with a pastry or other covering before baking. A two-crust pie has the filling completely enclosed in the pastry shell."

Which has elements I'd agree with but is not what I'd regard as definitive.

( I am pleased with myself for not diving in to the edit history on that one.)

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Isn't a cobbler more of a mushy-stuff-with-scones-on-top than a pie? It doesn't actually involve pastry as such, does it?

[venta.livejournal.com]

That was exactly what I was thinking. More of a scone-y topping, yer cobbler.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I agree. To me, cobbler is definitely much more scone-like than pastry-like on top, and there is no expectation that the component-made-mainly-from-flour-and-fat would appear anywhere but the top of the dish, albeit highly likely to have sunk a little way in to the filling.

I'm now thinking of ranking stewed fruit puddings by the structural integrity of the flour-and-fat topping: crumble, cobbler, lid-only pie.

I suspect an Americanism - I think in the US cobbler may well be a stealth term for a lid-only pie.

[venta.livejournal.com]

What a gentleman cooks himself, in the privacy of his own home and subject to the exigencies of what he had in the fridge, is his own affair (though I feel "tart" or "parcel" covers a lot of bases).

Mostly the crimes I feel are being committed here are those of description.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

A parcel really must cover the whole affair, surely?! A partially unwrapped parcel would make you think it was someone else's rejected parcel.

I've just realised one reason why I'm sometimes reluctant to call dishes made in pastry shells tarts. A roast tomato and olive filling? No problem. Squash, nuts and nutmeg? Somehow I don't want to call it that, unless I put lots of lemon juice in or maybe the right herbs. Yes, I turns out I don't want to call it a tart unless the filling is ... tart.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

The top only to type in pubs can be useful if you just want the contents though.

Hettie's mainly gluten free (she can tolerate small amounts), so can't eat the pastry. She'll quite often order pies if we're eating out in pubs and just lift the top off though.

Maybe not what was intended of the dish, but does give her extra options.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I don't dispute the validity of the top-crust pie. I don't even, really, dispute the validity of the stew hat, so long as it is correctly described on the menu.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I recently ordered a "steak and kidney pie", and was horrified to receive a stew, with the pastry all chopped up and mixed in with it. It just wasn't the same!

[venta.livejournal.com]

What horror is this? Pastry mixed in?

[deborahw37.livejournal.com]

Wrong on many levels of great intensity