After months of chasing false clues and red herrings, the expedition returned with a purported yeti scalp recovered from a remote monastery, a relic, which on laboratory scrutiny, turned out to belong to the common or garden Himalayan brown bear. The finding prompted, if not proved, the conclusion that the fabled yeti was a, well, fable.
Last month, I, too, went on a quest, though being neither a scientist nor an intrepid explorer. The object of my hunt was much smaller than the yeti but, according to nutritionists, equally abominable. I went looking for that most British of British items of ingestion: pork pie.
Consisting of minced pork covered in aspic, a jelly made of bone stock, the filling covered in shortcrust pastry and baked, the pork pie is said to have originated some 170 years ago in its present avatar in the Leicestershire town of Melton Mowbray, the most authentic of these comestibles bearing that place name.
I was not in Melton Mowbray, or anywhere in the vicinity, but in north London’s Archway, in a crowded supermarket. I scanned the well-stocked shelves: kala chana, moong dal, basmati rice, biryani masala, Bombay bhel mix. I went to the refrigerated section: couscous, hummus, tzatziki, halloumi, pita bread.
I flagged down a roving staffer and asked the whereabouts of pork pies. He looked at me as if I’d asked for directions to Neumayer Station 3 in Antarctica. After a moment’s thought, he waved a vague hand towards the dim recesses at the rear of the store. I ventured into the gloom and, sure enough, lurking there like furtive fugitives from Interpol who, having escaped the long arm of the law, lived in shady obscurity, I discovered the errant pork pies, my intended picnic lunch on nearby Hampstead Heath.Locating a suitable bench on the Heath, I opened the pack of four mini-pies, each the size of a golf ball. I bit into one. It didn’t taste like Melton Mowbray. It tasted like a back alley of Chittagong-on-the-Thames. It was as fake as a £3 banknote. Or a yeti scalp.The elusive, and ersatz, pies symbolise the fading twilight of the British way of life — lampooned by detractors as the ‘Brutish’ way of life – as represented by its culinary tastes. Fish-and-chips takeaways, or chippies, that other feature of British life, are becoming a sunset industry, yielding ground to purveyors of Caribbean jerk chicken, Turkish doner kebabs (‘We Use Halal Meat Only’), Ramen noodles, sushi, or poke bowls.
The local pub, its interior burnished with age and arcane ritual, its dark, cask-drawn ales and darker stout, black as winter midnight and warming as the hand of friendship, is under threat from the encroachment of glitzy bars offering rainbow-hued cocktails infused with health-boosting haldi shots as an accompaniment to Britain‘s long-established national dish, chicken tikka masala, a local concoction of tear-inducing fieriness.
It’s not just the mass import of such exotica that has radically altered Britain’s alimentation. The New Age trend of veganism (‘Milk is theft, meat is murder’) has reconstituted that piece de resistance of English epicureanism, the Beef Wellington — a fillet of bovine extraction, coated with pate, encased in puff pastry and cooked to golden perfection. It is being transmogrified into Vegan Wellington, the animal protein being replaced by an enigmatic amalgam of root vegetable matter. Similarly, the time-hallowed Sunday roast beef is increasingly being shelved in favour of a plant-based substitute of inscrutable provenance.
Is this the thin edge of the veg? What next? The Beefeater Guards outside the Tower of London turned into Tofu Guards? Coronation chicken reanointed as Coronation kaddu?
Dodgy pork pies and the London argot called Cockney rhyming slang may provide a clue to such questions. In this coded language, ‘trouble and strife’ translate into wife, ‘China plate’ into mate, ‘apples and pears’ into stairs. And ‘pork pie’ into lie. A fiction, like the yeti. Or the Britishness of Britain?
