What Constitutes a Pie

The latest spates of 'interview me's' has been quite revealing and because I'm between hanging out the washing and doing the vaccuming (something which makes me a little tired due to my recent bout of snots) I had a quick look at Grandads blog. He's hijacked some questions and caused a trans Atlantic controversy about what constitutes a pie! Brian has decided that pies can only be sweet, surrounded by pastry and preferably filled with fruit or something sticky. I'm inclined to agree that in order to be a pie, pastry must be involved.

Grandad likes the mashed potato type, Shepherds, Fish and similar. Here, we have mastered the meat pie. It's a football-goers staple, available in every school canteen and only occasionally contains pieces of plastic or the odd rat's dropping. The Australian Meat pie is about 12cm across, neatly hand sized. It generally contains what is loosely considered ground beef in a gloopy gravy although I suspect those little gristly bits are lips and assholes. By law, it needs to contain only 25% meat. It is eaten hot and topped with tomato sauce although that in itself promotes controversy. Do you slop the sauce on the top of the lid and risk it splotching all over your T shirt or do you poke the sauce dispenser into the crust and give it a generous squirt? If you live in South Australia you have what is affectionately termed a 'floater' and top your pie with mushy peas. Then there are the gourmet pies - Thai chicken curry, peppercorn and mushroom or cottage pie with lashings of reconstituted mashed potato. Personally, I'm not a lover of the pie - it's very un-Australian of me but there you go.

And for the record . . . a burger is not a burger unless it contains a meat patti, lettuce, tomato, fried onions, beetroot, plastic cheese and tomato or BBQ sauce . . . the pickle is a fabrication of MacDonalds and totally inappropriatee . . . and if you want a burger with 'the lot' it also involves a fried egg and a rasher of bacon!

"So where's the egg, bacon and beetroot?"