An Expat Returns: Food I’ve Missed - The Good Old British Pie

I mentioned in my last blog that I’d write up some of the meals I drooled over in the 17 months I spent living in hotels in SE Asia, with only a kettle to cook in. And at the top of the list, or thereabouts, was the good old British pie.

What would I cook first, now I had a kitchen again? Steak and kidney pudding? Chicken and mushroom? Minced beef and onion? A proper pork pie or Cornish pasty? Or how about one from The English Cookery Book by Lucie G Nicoll I’m re-reading? A curiously quirky and charmingly vague book that for the second season of the year (April, May, June - if indeed it is early summer now, and not late autumn which the weather seems to suggest) recommends May Pie - an unspecified pastry filled with stewed young onions, turnips, carrots, lettuce hearts, parsley, and green peas in gravy. Or salmon pie - which is more of a baked fish loaf than a pie - containing just milk-soaked breadcrumbs, salmon, butter, seasoning, and beaten egg.

To be honest, neither was what I was imagining in those long evenings supping iced beer while discussing the merits of meat pies with Kiwis - a people that seem to hold the crumbly, fat-soaked comfort of flesh and pastry in even higher esteem than the Bovril-swigging English football fan.

In fact, I had to go back to the first season of January, February and March (who said the seasons aren’t changing?) to get on to the good stuff like beefsteak and kidney pudding made with nothing more than rump steak, beef kidney, flour, and ‘suet paste’. Or calf’s head pie made with head stock and meat and boiled eggs. Or Fanny pie comprising beef, mutton, bacon, onion, carrot, potato and ‘rich paste’. Or how about vermicelli pie, mutton pie, or bacon and herb pie?

No, I’d make it my own way from whatever needed using up in the fridge and freezer - in this case three chicken breasts and a bag of 18-month-old frozen leeks - a concoction which with a midnight plunder of next door’s herb garden  became ‘chicken and leek pie in tarragon pastry’.

And I have to say I was really chuffed with the result. It was so filled with herbs, it sort of stumbled drunkenly on the tongue in a heady bouquet, like sage derby on a few crackers. And although I’d made up the tarragon pastry on the spot, it turned out crispy, delicious and thankfully golden despite the unappetising green colour before it was cooked.

Anyway, enough talk. Here it is. It’s really worth a go - especially if, like me, you’ve been pie less in a pie-filled world for far longer than you’d care to recall.

Chicken And Leek Pie In Tarragon Pastry

For the filling:

A little butter and olive oil for frying

3 shallots, finely chopped

2 sticks of celery, peeled, cut into four lengthways, and then diced

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

2 leeks, washed well and sliced

3 thyme sprigs, chopped

3 chicken breasts, cut into 2cm-wide cubes

1 bacon rasher, thinly sliced

50g butter

50g flour

300ml milk

1/4 nutmeg, freshly grated

salt and pepper

For the pastry:

300g plain flour

150g lard

1 level tsp salt

Leaves from 3 tarragon sprigs

130ml of cold water

A greased pie dish, 8 inches wide and 2 inches deep

Melt a knob of butter and a splash of olive oil in a pan and fry the shallots for a couple of minutes until they are slightly browned. Add the leeks, garlic and celery and fry for another few minutes, stirring frequently to stop the mixture catching. 

Add the bacon and chicken breast. Lower the heat, and continue cooking for another 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Meanwhile, make the pastry by putting the flour, tarragon, salt and lard in a food mixer and pulsing until it resembles greeny-grey breadcrumbs. The amount of water you add will depend on how much moisture was in the tarragon. Mine took about 130ml of water. Continue pulsing the breadcrumbs while trickling in the water. Stop when the pastry forms a ball and comes away clean from the sides of the processor. Cover with clingfilm and put in the freezer to chill.

Add 50g of flour and the freshly grated nutmeg to the pie filling and stir well for a minute over a low heat. Slowly add the milk, making sure each splash is fully blended in before adding the next one. By the end, the sauce should be the consistency of thick custard. If it’s too thick, add a little water. Continue simmering for another five minutes, stirring all the time, then take off the heat. Add the chopped thyme and season with salt and pepper.

Remove the pastry from the freezer and knead a couple of times on a lightly-floured board. Take two thirds of the ball, flatten into a disc with your hands, and roll into a circle about three inches wider than the pie dish.

Drape the pastry circle over the rolling pin, and then line the heavily-buttered pie dish. Push down gently to make sure there are no air pockets. Trim the pastry from the sides.

Roll out the excess pastry until about 5mm thick. Cut into strips. Brush the trimmed pastry edge with water and lay the strips on the rim of the pie dish and gently press together. Brush the pastry rim with water. Fill the pie with the creamy chicken and leek filling.

Roll out the remaining pastry to fit the top of the dish, and press the pastry edges together. Cut round the dish to remove the excess pastry, and then squeeze the edges together with a fork. Roll out the surplus pastry and cut into leaf designs to decorate the pie. 

Brush the pastry with egg yolk. Pre-heat the oven to 180C and bake the pie for one hour, or until a beautiful golden brown colour.

:: My new book 'Down And Out In Padstow And London' about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, Rick Stein's and other restaurants, is available as a paperback and eBook on Amazon CLICK HERE

Making Pork Pies In Costa Del Cambodia

It all started in a drunken conversation in a bar in Sihanoukville, when I met this retired financier from New Zealand, who part owns a restaurant on the corner, and he convinced me that the next big thing in Cambodia would be the pork pie. He said expats and tourists were crying out for them, but he couldn’t get them anywhere, and he’d had no luck making them.

“It’s the pastry! I can’t do the pastry,” Josh said, rocking from side to side with a cigarette in his mouth. “I can do everything else. I’ve got this delicious jelly I’ve made in the freezer. Wonderful!” He smacked his lips. “There’s a mincer in the kitchen, but the pastry, no. I can’t make the pastry...”

We sat around for a few hours discussing the merits of pork pies and I thought that was pretty much the end of the matter. Then I saw him in the same bar the next night and he started going on about pork pies again. I may have mentioned that I’d worked as a chef. I may even have boasted a bit about my pie-making skills. But at some point, I must have agreed to help him. Josh introduced me to his business partner Tom, an English gent who’d retired to the tropics after he got tired of show jumping.

“So you’re the pork pie expert?” he said, shaking my hand.

I knew I was in trouble.

“I have to tell you, I’m quite a lover of pork pies,” he added.

There was only one thing for it. I’d go back to my windswept, Wild West-style guesthouse, and do some pork pie research on the internet and then practise the pastry in their kitchen until I perfected it.

I told Josh we’d need some lard. Luckily, he said you couldn’t get it anywhere in Cambodia.

“Butter no problem. But lard? No. No lard. Forget it.”

I got some recipes and tips from some helpful food writers, bakers, and chefs on Twitter - thanks particularly to @dan_lepard and @meemalee and @AoaFoodie and those purveyors of very fine pork pies @Brays_Cottage - and spent the next night making notes as I read everything I could on pork pies.

Some hot water crust pastry recipes use butter and even eggs as well as lard, but they all use lard to some extent. The only one I could find that used butter and no lard was Rick Stein’s pork pie recipe. But I was dubious about that. I knew what he’d done to the Cornish pasty, and how he’d upset the locals by using the ‘wrong’ pastry.

I was convinced Tom – who clearly was the senior partner in the business (and what’s that? Was I beginning to detect the notes of a long-faint Leicestershire accent?) – would be a stickler for a traditional pie crust. Stein’s version also used anchovy essence in the filling, like Jane Grigson’s famous recipe, and I had doubts about what Tom would think of that, even if it was said to be a traditional Melton Mowbray ingredient.

I told them it was impossible without the lard.

Then Josh had an idea. He could scoop off the fat that collected when he boiled down “bags of beef” for his dogs. I wasn’t keen. I didn’t like the sound of bags of beef in Cambodia, especially meat set aside for dogs. There were far too many people disappearing in the town.

I pompously told him the pork pie was all about a celebration of the pig, and involved pork done three ways - baking the fat-laden pastry, boiling the pork stock, and steaming the peppery filling.

I waffled on about how the filling – flavoured with salt, pepper, thyme, sage, nutmeg, and perhaps mace or allspice but probably no anchovy - is a tribute to cured and uncured pork, and its fattiness and texture, from the knife-chopped pork shoulder, to the coarsely minced pork belly, to the finely minced back bacon.

The succulent jelly (or gravy, as it is called in some areas) – with carrot, onion, bay leaf, thyme, pepper, and sea salt – is a nod to the satisfying gloop that pork bones and trotters bring to a stock. And the pastry is a celebration of how pig fat can produce rich, crisp, and yet moist pie crusts. In essence, I politely told him that the fat he’d get from his dodgy beef would be no good, and that we needed pig fat.

“Oh, pig fat! You didn’t say it had to be from pigs! Pig fat, no problem. Lard, no. Pig fat yes! We can get shit loads of pig fat. Leave that to me.”

By now, he’d shown me round his kitchen (above) and I was quickly going off the idea. It was tiny. It made the Fat Duck’s kitchen look like a cricket pitch. And the heat! It was 37C in the shade, but with no extraction unit and the oven on making pizzas, it was like an inferno in there.

There was a fan in the corner, but if you turned it on, it blew out the gas rings. But worst of all, there were two Cambodian cooks sharing a surface space (the most crucial dimension in any kitchen if you want to retain at least some sanity) scarcely more than 3ft wide. There was no room to roll out the pizzas they were making, let alone pie pastry as well. And the Cambodian oven! It definitely wasn’t the sort of kitchen to launch a pork pie empire.

There were a few more colourful characters sitting round the bar the next night. They’d all heard about the pork pie business. I was surprised how fast gossip travels in expat circles – it’s even faster than kitchens.

One of them, a retired boxer from Manchester, said he was hooked on TV cookery programmes. Then the rest were at it. They were all experts, and started swapping recipe tips and talking about the food they missed from home, and what celebrity chefs they did and didn’t like.

“I loved Keith Floyd!” mused the barman, wrinkling his Keith Richards face.

“Yeah he’s fucking ace,” said the boxer. “He’s one of the top, top chefs. Haven’t seen much of him on telly like...what’s he doing now?”

“He’s dead,” I said, holding up a sang som in Floyd’s memory. “He passed away almost two years ago.”

“No! Get on! Really?” said the boxer. “That’s the thing, you miss out on all that living out here...”

Josh turned up. He still hadn’t been able to get his hands on pig fat, much to my relief. I talked about how we could buy a whole pig from the market and render it down, and I could see he was going off the idea. Then I asked if you could get mace here.

“Mace, no. Nutmeg, yes. We can get shit loads of nutmeg, as much nutmeg as you fucking want, but no mace. No way! Why, do we need it?”

I told him the best pork pies had mace in them, and that we might as well do it properly.

“Well, you’ll have to get on with it! I’m going home in nine days,” said an old Aussie. “Why don’t you make a curry tomorrow night instead?”

It was brilliant. Everyone was in agreement. Curry! What could be even more British than a good old pork pie than curry! The fear and nerves vanished. A curry! If there was one thing I could make it was curry. I’d eaten at the only Indian restaurant in our side of town, and it’d been awful. I could corner the curry market. Become Mr Curry of Sihanoukville (small acorns). I had no qualms about curry – even in Josh’s tiny kitchen. Then it turned out the boxer was an expert on curries too.

“I haven’t had a good curry for years,” he said. “I lived on the Curry Mile in the Wilmslow Road, the best fucking curries in the world, man...”

Then they were all discussing good curries they'd had, and the nerves started to test again.

“Hey chef, what meat makes the best curry?” the boxer shouted over at me.

“That’s it! Fucking lamb,” he replied, smacking the back of his hand. “It’s alright, he does know his stuff...”

Josh said lamb was hideously expensive in Cambodia. He’d bought a 4kg leg for this weekend’s Sunday roast for $54 (£35). I told him I could get a massaged leg from Fortnum & Mason for that, and he pointed out that Fortnum & Mason wasn't round the corner. He said the cheapest meats were pork and chicken, so I decided on my trusty old, tried-and-tested chicken Madras-style curry recipe.

“Yeah, but what about spices? What about all your cardamoms and that?” said the boxer.

“There’s an Indian restaurant round the corner!” I said slightly irritably.

“Yeah, but your fenugreeks and curry leaves...you'll want them...I don’t know, you’re not in the right country for it...”

I became more drunk as the night wore on, and at some point told them I was going to make “the best bloody curry they’d ever had”. It was a bold statement. Very bold. They looked the sort that got Christmas cards from their local Indian take-away.

I walked back to my guesthouse in the small hours, hoping I’d remember to turn my alarm on and be round at the restaurant at 8.30am to be down the market for nine.