balance

Scottish Meat Pie

I love the Historical New York Times. If you haven't browsed its rowdy pages, or considered the pleasure that a good bit of muckracking reporting can bring, I offer you the following anecdote, from January 23, 1900:

Yes, you read correctly.

The article continues "Brooklyn was visited by a pie famine yesterday, and the Harolds and Reginalds employed in the office buildings about the Borough Hall, the high school girls, and pie eaters generally were depressed in spirit all day."

The loss, blamed on "the archfiend who has charge of the mince-pie bureau," included approximately 3,000 pies: "plum, peach, lemon, meringue, and the insidious mince." All lost in the wreckage of a collapsed oven roof or devoured by flames from an ensuing fire.

I've wondered, in the last two years since reading this lovely passage, what about pie so offended the hygienic diet-conscious elite of the time. Kate Masterson, on August 10, 1902, opined that pie "possesses injurious qualities" and predicted that continued consumption threatened to "kill all appreciation of art in the minds of the young." To me, pie has always seemed so 4th-of-July, Thanksgiving, family time. Even reimagined as a pie-in-the-face, it remained fun. Lighthearted even.

Then I went to Scotland.

Scotland is lovely: green, with loads of rain and fluffy sheep and really heavy breakfasts. Even better, it is home to Steve and MBC, who are amazing and love graveyards and sticky sweet things and have an allotment that we got to work in.

It also has Scottish pies.

Scottish pies, it turns out, are what Miss Masterson was talking about. They are certainly little packets of energy-denseness, but they also land on the stomach with a clang that sets your entire digestive tract a-quivering in fear. I think I will stick with my version of meat pie.