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Pie: A Global History

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Janet Clarkson

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“To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (...), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongi-form bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run over them? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.”

BusinessCookingKitchenChefFood WritingRestaurantFood Industry
Book:Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
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“The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia - brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.”

Travel WritingFood WritingFood AnthropologyNova ScotiaCodCodfishLunenburg
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“Words often give clues to the origin of things, and I hoped to learn much about the history of the pie from the word 'pie'. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its first known use as being in the expense accounts of the Bolton Priory in Yorkshire in 1303 (although the name 'Pyman' is recorded in 1301), but admits that its origin is uncertain and that 'no further related word is known outside English'. It suggests that the word is identical in form to the same word meaning 'magpie' (...). The suggested connection is that a pie has contents of 'miscellaneous nature', similar to the magpie's colouring or to the odds and ends picked up and used by the bird to adorn its nest.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“The problem with cooking meat this way [open fire] is that even if it does not burn, the valuable and tasty juices drip away and the meat dries and shrinks. Other cooks at other times got around this problem by wrapping the meat up to protect it - in leaves, for example. Or clay. Clay that, to another cook in perhaps, another time and place, felt just like dough. This last inspired step created the primitive meat pie - something medieval cooks called a 'bake-mete'.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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