It takes a city, a village, and some long gone people to bake a pie

Pigeon and elderberry pie, with a suet crust

It was a usual Friday at the market, visiting the stalls to find out what was best that day. I couldn’t get near the fishmongers; Fridays are quite the day for fish lovers, and so I slipped behind the butchery to ask Rick what exciting things were happening. ‘Not much’ he replied, as he jerked the wings off a pigeon. ‘How can you say not much when you’re standing over a massive box of birds?’ I asked, and he side-eyed me with nonchalance. ‘Where did you get them from?’ I furthered, and he told me that the local shooter had ‘turned up with fifty of the damned things’. Rick quite likes to play the grump when he’s usually quite the delight.

 ‘Well then you had better give me two of them, and could you please take the breasts off the carcass?’ He handed them to Mike who plopped them on the block and swiftly sliced the flesh from the bones. ‘I hope you’re going to give me credit for this’ Mike said, and this was when I decided I might try to write something more about the people and process in my cooking. ‘Of course’ I replied with a smirk ‘I’m always really grateful for our conversations about meat’ and we stood for a while talking about how his tastes were more Mediterranean, and mine were more Victorian. He promised to put the birds aside for me, plus two chicken carcasses, as I wandered over to see Teresa on the cheese stall. She proudly told me about the box of fruit vinegars she had made that were still in the trunk of her car, so I offered to go and get them for her. It turned out she had a couple of bottles of Elderberry vinegar, so I promptly paid for one and declared that I might make a pigeon salad with an elderberry vinaigrette, though as I wandered away, I decided it would be all the better for making a pie with a suet crust and using it in the gravy. Suet because, firstly, I feel really lucky that I am able to get my hands on it so easily and, secondly, because my grandma would be upset if I didn’t, now that I had thought about it, even though she’s long not been here. I do a lot of things based on how my grandma would feel about them, and that helps me to keep her alive in my memory. ‘Mike, can you add some suet to my bag please?’ I called across the market, and he nodded. Casting my eyes over the veg stall, the turnips made me smile recalling the papers lately and the ‘furore’ around Thérèse Coffey’s encouragement to the nation in the wake of fresh fruit and veg shortages to ‘cherish the turnip’. Why she chose the turnip as an example of great local British winter produce when she could have chosen the celeriac I do not know, but I concluded that I ought to give as much love to turnips as I do to the celeriac. So I added them to my crate and asked Sophia to stash them away until the end of the day. That evening, I carted my groceries home, wondering how I might also factor the French tarragon plant that I had bought into my escapades.

The next morning as I was drinking tea in bed, my mother sent me a picture of a page from a Margaret Attwood book she’s reading and how funny she found a passage about Colonel Parkman galloping into a nearby petunia bed while waving his sword in the air. This kind of humour is very particular to my mother, so I rang her to enjoy her amusement. We got to talking about my pigeon plans and she commented on ‘those poor things’. I asked her if it were better that they were farmed year-round with thousands of other birds walking around in their own piss and shit and sent down a conveyor belt into an electric bath, their waste running off into our rivers, or better to be quickly dispatched in the autumn and winter while sitting in a tree enjoying a berry or two? ‘I don’t know’ she said, and then told me to bugger off so she could carry on reading her book. 

After a while, I pulled myself out of bed and set about preparing a baking tray filled with both the chicken and pigeon carcasses, as well as plenty of celery, onion, garlic, carrots and leeks. I love the way my stock trays look: much like a painting, I think, the edges of the tray are the frame, and the image a cornucopia of colour and goodness. While they roasted in the oven, I made a coffee and loitered on the sofa still wondering about the turnips. After nearly an hour of distracted thought, I added the tray to a cast iron pan with plenty of water. I took my Nana’s old brass scales from the cupboard, and thought about her for a moment and how, unlike my grandmother, we really didn’t have much of a relationship at all. I very much appreciate the longevity of her scales, though. They’re probably the closest I get to her, and she’s been long gone too. I grated the suet, admiring the way it crumbled in my hands, and the pretty flecks of pink among the white fat, and I opened the cupboards to take down my large ceramic flour pot. I acquired this as soon as I had my ‘first home’ because I knew it was mandatory to do so in the interests of nostalgia, and I am very driven by nostalgia. Call it an important move in the progression as an avid home cook. Baking wouldn’t be what I know without one. They just feel ‘right’ and not having one would be ‘wrong’. Before I forgot, I chose disco as my playlist for the pastry, which always reminds me of bombing around in the car with my mum running errands and dancing - disco gets things done, basically. Singing loudly, I knew that my neighbour Alun downstairs would promptly call. He knows when I‘m cooking because all he can hear is my singing and stomping. He loves to bring me things. Last week it was oil-ink marbles. The week before it was a book on Oscar Wilde’s musings. I think it pleases him to bring me things as much as it does this nearly 90 year old man to clear his home of things he quite likes, and yet doesn’t have the need for anymore. That, and he really likes my hair and will take any reason to tell me so. My grandma loved my hair too. I think they would have gotten along very well.  He and my mother find each other really delightful. He would find colonel’s riding off into beds of petunias funny too. I must remember to tell him. He’s a kind of family is Alun. And very well loved in this village as both the head of the choir, and the tree warden. He also has a penchant for discussing magic mushrooms and I often think he’s inviting me to take some, without directly saying so. He knows where to find them, anyway.

Speaking of older souls, as I reached for my new second hand red cast iron crock pot, I had to smile thinking of Charlotte who runs the Pilgrim’s Hopsice charity shop in town. We have a warming way of singing ‘Hell-ooo’ to each other whenever I come through the door at opening time on Friday mornings for a quick look for treasure. She told me that I had to take good care of this pot as a volunteer had brought it in and was quite sad to part with it. It’s as if Charlotte knows I’m a messy one in the kitchen, but as I reach for the wooden spoons that have been going for it since at least the 1980s, I’m reassured by the quality that old things have, as if the attention we have consistently paid them for years keeps them strong. 

I snipped the pigeon breasts into smaller pieces and floured them thoroughly before browning them in plenty of butter. There’s no golden brown on meat like there is from cast iron, and deglazing the pot with elderberry vinegar instantly created a thick, silky sauce. I added sliced leeks, grated celeriac, chunks of half an apple with the skin still on (risky business because the skin can sometimes add a bitter note, but I wanted all the roughage and hoped for the best) and a few odds and ends that had been bubbling in the stock pot - a carrot, layers of gleaming onions and a couple of garlic cloves. I deglazed the pot again, this time with the last of a bottle of really good value Romanian red wine (thanks to Paul at the market for the introduction) and returned the pigeon that I had set aside with a few ladles of stock and some smoked salt. Leaving it to simmer, I topped up the remaining stock with water, a handful of peppercorns, and some bay leaves that I stole from Nancy’s garden quite a while ago, and threw it all into the slow cooker to be left until the following morning. 

Turning my attention to the pastry, I floured the counters and rolled it out, ignoring everything my grandma ever told me about which direction to roll in. That was just how we cooked together. With joy, and yet also with our own stubborn streak and gentle bickering. There’s a home video somewhere of us arguing about how to scramble eggs and if you look closely, amidst the bitter words flying back and forth, you can see little smiles on the corners of our mouths. This must be why I love Tove Jansson’s ‘Summer Book’ about a little girl and her grandmother. If you ever had a grandma you really, really loved, you ought to read this one. I dust my hands off on my trousers (another slight at grandma) and quickly order my mum a copy there and then because I just know how much she will howl with laughter at the part where six-year-old Sophia slips her grandma a letter under the door reading ‘I hate you. With warm personal wishes, Sophia.’

I buttered the edges of a lovely old stone pie dish (Charlotte didn’t give me any grief about this one) and spooned in the sauce before laying the pastry over the top, making little holes for the steam and remembering that I must get grandma’s little baking bird from mum’s garage. Why I haven’t taken it before, I do not know. I brushed it with milk, popped it in the oven and turned my attention to the turnips. I decided to boil them and then puree them with the wild garlic that Nancy and I had picked early the Sunday morning before. Realising that I had drank the last of the sour milk from the bottle only moments before, I decided that plenty of butter would be the solution, as well as the last of a sachet of French instant mousline potato that I always make people buy for me when they’re in France. Thankfully for Thérèse Coffey, it worked. By this point, the pie was ready, and what a pie it looked! The pastry was perfectly crisp, the sauce a fine balance between sweet and savoury with a nod from the vinegar, and the mousline fiercely peppery and yet beautifully creamy. I felt nearly moved to tears. It was that good but, also, because of all the people that played a part in this one. I get asked for recipes alot but I’m not sure I can bring myself to write over 2000 words each time, because that’s just a fraction of what it takes to understand that it doesn’t take a solitary soul to create something, in this case it took a city, a village, and some long gone people to bake a pie.