Heritage ... Fish Pie

by Helen Gaffney

From the highest to the humblest tables in the land, fish pie has always been on the menu. The British never did like the Romans and when they left after four centuries of occupation we turned the fish of which they were so fond into penitential food. It was not until the fifteenth century, when meatless days decreed by the church numbered nearly 200, that cooks saw it as a challenge to make fish a treat. Now they concocted gorgeous pies of triumphantly decorated pastry packed with flaked fish and crystallised fruits, for special occasions glazing the top crust with sugar.

Medieval Britons didn’t see any need to separate savoury from sweet and fruity. Mackerel and gooseberry first met under a pie crust! In The English Housewife in 1649, Gervase Markham describes cod pie with pears and crystallised lemon peel. In Yorkshire, apples and potatoes were put into herring pies and Cornish folk liked a similar combination in a pastie.

The Cornish also invented the most ghoulish fish dish in history - Stargazey pie. Pilchards or herrings were sandwiched whole, and often unboned, in a single or double-crust pie with their little heads poking through the pastry. How your mouth was supposed to separate fish bones from flesh and pastry is not recorded (nor why this gruesome dish underwent a brief revival in the 1970s).

For centuries, what type of fish pie you ate remained very much a matter of where you lived. Shakespeare mentions the cockney fondness for eel pie in King Lear, and there is even an Eel Island in the Thames named after this dish. It seems to be along the east coast of Scotland, where salting and smoking of fish was a cottage industry, that potato was first commonly used to soften the salty flavour. Elizabeth Craig, who was born in a manse (a Scottish vicarage) in 1883, recalled her mother's Friday combination of salt cod and mashed potato in her cookbooks.

Salmon was popular in pies, especially up until the turn of the twentieth century when it was quite affordable - a whole wild fish cost less than two pence in today’s terms. Batalia fish pie, recorded in 1675, had pastry towers and battlements filled with salmon and prawns. In 1767 in The Experienced English Housekeeper, Elizabeth Raffald gave a recipe for salmon pie in which boned fish was spiced and pounded, then topped with lemon slices, butter and fennel sprigs.

Fish pies can be as simple as you want them to be, but good fish plus a few shellfish in a carefully made sauce will always make a grand pie. There are several recipes on the site so hopefully there will always be one to suit an occasion.

Fish Pie Recipes