Porc En Croute Avec Pois Écrasés

In the same way you don't visit Yorkshire to get a sun tan, you don't go there and expect to lose weight. On my week-long visit I consumed* fish and chips three times, a curry and three pies - two of which came with mushy peas.

Pie and peas is the great Yorkshire meal. Classless, simple - you can eat it with a spoon - nutritious, filling and with the exception of Bradford beer festival, (great pie, not enough peas for £3.50) cheap. It's comfort food par excellence. A teatime favourite as well as a staple of football terraces, after-match rugby, village cricket lunches, bonfire night and Christmas eve. I've even eaten it (£1.50) in the grade 1 listed magnificence of Leeds Parish Church. The mushy element is very important - purists will only accept them made from dried peas, soaked with bicarbonate of soda and boiled for hours. You can see the difference above - the lower picture is the tinned variety. But It's the pie that really matters, and a butcher's reputation is only as good as his last porker. There are some heavy hitters in Airedale - Stanforth's, Affer faves Drake and Macefield and Ted Lee in Skipton. Lunds and Herd's further down the valley in Keighley, where people still talk about how good the long-gone Midgely's pies once were. I've said it before, and I'll say it again; If pie and peas was from the Ariége it'd be on the menu of the best restaurants in London.


*not all in one go.

Piecycle

Managed to combine two of my favourite things today - pies and cycling. Boris Johnson very kindly put a dock of his new hire bikes almost outside my office door. Member's card in the slot, green light on, a hefty tug on the handlebars and I was off, leaving a knot of amused tourists on the pavement. The bike's heavy, but well-made and comfy. A big friendly dog of a bike. It tackled the slight slope of Southwark Bridge with no drama, helped along by three very low gears. It certainly attracted a lot of attention. At one set of lights a group of office workers looked me and the vehicle over. "See, he's a fat bloke and it copes with him on it" - said one, before going bright red when she realised that sitting on a bicycle doesn't render you deaf. I dropped the bike in the dock at Southwark Street and nipped into Borough market to pick up a Huntsman Pie from Sillfield, and have a quick chuckle at the prices in Utobeer. After grabbing another bike, I found myself riding alongside none other than Boris Johnson himself. "So, how is it?" he fopped. "Great!" I replied. "Marvellous. Have a good one!" he blustered, and was off.

Returning the bike to Great Tower Street was less successful. The dock made a grinding noise, and a red light stayed ominously on. The bike was locked in, but the red light meant that as far as the system knew, I was still tootling around EC3. The call centre assured me all would be OK, but I can't help thinking that somewhere a computer is preparing a £300 fine. Still, the pie was excellent.

Super Pie Guy

It started with one, and ended up with nine. And it's getting quite expensive. I'm talking about the amount of meat-and-potato pies my colleagues insist on me bringing back from trips to Keighley. My parents' local butcher, Herd's, has been selling quality meat to the town for at least 50 years. There's always a queue, and at Christmas the locals are lined up right round the corner, or collecting their trays of 12 warm pork pies from the back door for a Christmas Eve pie and pea supper party. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If pie and peas was a Piedmontese peasant dish it would be served up in the finest restaurants in Europe.

Herd's meat is as good as anything I've seen or tasted in Italy or France, and those meat and potato pies have a pavlov's dog-like effect on me whenever I think of them. In fact, my mouth's watering as I type this. It's even whispered that people come from Lancashire for these pies. The beef comes from the butcher's father-in-law's farm, in the bucolic reaches of the Worth Valley. The cows live a happy life eating the lush emerald grass of this rainy corner of God's Own County. The farmer tucks them up every night in their centrally heated byre, and reads them a story as the contented cows drift off to sleep. I can't honestly say if the potatoes had a similarly joyful life before they were pulled from the rich loam of the Vale Of York, to be stacked beneath a lightning-riven oak, then loaded onto a Bedford TK and driven off to the wholesale market at Beverley by a bib-and-brace overalls-wearing pipe-smoking bloke called Alf. Let's just say they did.