“Dear Lord, give us this day our daily pies.”
Heads bow dutifully as the bearded bishop leads the hushed congregation in earnest prayer, and we give thanks for what we are about to receive: a thousand meat-filled crusts, laid out on trestle tables like sacrificial offerings to the gods of lard and flour.
Around us, sunlight spills across the nave in shafts of soft, ecclesiastical light, illuminating pies sent in from every corner of the country. More than 200 people watch on, armed with clipboards and plastic forks. “I’ve never seen the church this full for an ordinary service,” the bishop says, looking out across the sea of pastry.
In St Mary’s Church in Melton Mowbray, this is the holiest of days. The 18th British Pie Awards are about to begin.
The pie occupies an odd place in the British imagination.
For many people, a pie is little more than a belly-filling convenience, something bought at a petrol station or football stadium, a greasy hot object wrapped in paper whose purpose is to line the stomach before returning to the pub or the motorway. It is a food associated with practicality rather than prestige, with industrial ovens rather than culinary artistry. It is precisely this reputation that the Pie Awards exist to challenge.
“The pie is Britain’s greatest contribution to the world culinary stage,” says Dr Matthew O’Callaghan, the president of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, and the man responsible for bringing these awards to the world. He is also, due to a cruel mid-life allergy development, now a vegetarian.
Once upon a time, pastry was the architectural framework of some of Britain’s most elaborate feasts. Roman cooks used thick pastry shells, known as coffins, as protective containers in which meat could be roasted slowly over fire, the crust itself often discarded afterwards, having served its purpose as edible cookware.
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