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

[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.