Pie and mash is the traditional working-class meal of East and South East London: a small minced beef pie, a scoop or two of mashed potato, and a ladle of bright green parsley sauce called liquor poured over the lot.
The liquor
The element that defines the dish and confuses everyone who hears the name. It contains no alcohol. It is a thin parsley sauce, vividly green, and it was originally made using the stock in which eels had been stewed.
The shops sold both eels and pies, the eel liquor was the by-product, and pouring it over the pie was simply sensible economy. Most shops now make it without eel, though a few traditionalists still do it the old way.
The shops
A proper pie and mash shop is an experience in itself, and the surviving ones have changed almost nothing:
- White tiled walls and a tiled floor, for hosing down.
- Marble-topped tables and wooden benches, shared with strangers.
- Bentwood or cast-iron seating, fixed in place.
- Bottles of chilli vinegar on every table — the traditional condiment, and essential.
- An enamel sign, a counter at the front, and no menu to speak of because there is nothing to choose.
M. Manze on Tower Bridge Road, open since 1902, is the oldest surviving pie and mash shop in London. F. Cooke and G. Kelly are the other great names, and several of these businesses have been run by the same families for four or five generations.
How it is eaten
The mash is traditionally applied with a knife and smeared round the plate rather than scooped, which is how the servers do it. The pie sits upside down. Liquor goes over everything, chilli vinegar over that, and it is eaten with a fork and spoon rather than a knife.
The whole thing costs very little and is served in under a minute.
The decline
There were once hundreds of pie and mash shops across London. There are now a few dozen, and the number falls most years.
The causes are the familiar ones: the East End communities that ate this food dispersed to Essex and Kent through the second half of the twentieth century, rents in the districts they left have become extraordinary, and the buildings are worth far more as anything else. Several long-standing shops have closed in the last decade, each with a queue round the block on the final day.
Some have followed their customers out — there are now pie and mash shops in Romford, Basildon and Rayleigh doing better trade than those left in London.
Getting listed
There is an active campaign to have pie and mash granted protected status, in the way the Cornish pasty and Melton Mowbray pork pie have been. It has been raised in Parliament. Whether it succeeds or not, the fact that anyone is trying says something about how the dish is regarded — not as food so much as a surviving piece of a London that has mostly gone.