Pies made for a nutrient-dense food that could utilise meat off-cuts, the bread or pastry exterior helped to preserve the filling, they could be eaten hot or cold and, depending on the style, were\u00a0 portable for a labourer working away from home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In British culinary tradition, meat pies have historically occupied a rare status across classes; serving as both a working class staple and a special dish that could be prepared for high-ranking people on special ocassions. In the Canterbury Tales, 14th century English writer Geoffrey Chaucer described a talented chef who could \u201cwel bake a pye\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When European immigrants began moving to New Zealand and Australia, they brought with them the pie traditions of their homelands: Melton Mowbray pork pies, scotch pies, steak and kidney pies, Irish Dingle pies and many more. Several advertisements for pie dishes and crockery appeared in newspapers from the first decade of British settlement, and pie-related idioms such as \u201ceating humble pie<\/a>\u201d and \u201cfinger in the pie\u201d<\/a> were common \u2013 clearly, the British pie-making tradition had made it across the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Wellington that same year<\/a> there was a mention of pies being consumed at a council meeting at Barret\u2019s Hotel, but the 1840s are otherwise a dark age for pies in New Zealand. The primary mention of pies in this period came from crockery suppliers advertising pie dishes.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first ad for a meat pies in New Zealand comes from 1856<\/a>, when the Temperance Coffee Room on High Street Dunedin, advertised \u201chot pies\u201d alongside soup and sausages, though there is no mention of what kind of pie this was.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Nelson, founded by primarily English settlers, butchers started advertising pork pies as early as 1858<\/a>. In Dunedin, made up of a Scottish diaspora, mutton pies reigned supreme \u2013 drawing their influence from Scotch Pies.\u00a0<\/p>\n These pies are made from a hard crust known as hot water pastry, were raised by hand, and filled with a solid chunk of spiced minced meat rather than chunks of braised meats in a saucy gravy. You can still find evidence of the tradition in small towns in Otago, where many bakeries pride themselves on their mutton pies. The big difference is that the modern version uses the softer shortcrust and flaky combination common for other New Zealand meat pies.\u00a0<\/p>\n From the 1860s<\/a> onwards, ads for mutton pie settlers became a regular feature in newspapers from Dunedin, Timaru,<\/a> and Queenstown<\/a>, and the West Coast. In 1876<\/a> the Otago Daily Times reported on a fire in Dunedin which burned down a \u201ctravelling mutton pie shop and coffee stall\u201d \u2013 the first clear New Zealand evidence of pies being sold as a portable takeaway food.\u00a0<\/p>\n Beef and steak pies appeared on the occasional ad in the 1860s and 70s but seem to have become increasingly popular around the turn of the 20th century. In 1887, Ng\u0101 Puhi leader and M\u0101ori MP Ihaka Hakuene died of suspected poisoning from a beef steak pie<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The earliest New Zealand recipes for beef pies were large family-style pot pies topped with a layer of pastry \u2013 one recipe from 1891<\/a> even called for the inclusion of four hard boiled eggs and a few oysters.\u00a0<\/p>\n When it comes to the classic New Zealand meat pie, there is no clear origin point. There was no invention, no eureka moment. It was a product of evolution, a gradual iteration on millenia of pie tradition that eventually led to the creation of a subtly unique dish.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first recipe for meat-based \u201cpie\u201d in a New Zealand newspaper is a rice-based monstrosity which appeared in an 1843<\/a> edition of the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nIt\u2019s enough to make you shudder. Source: Nelson Examiner\/PapersPast<\/p>\n
Some pie-related headlines from 19th and 20th-century New Zealand newspapers. Source: PapersPast<\/p>\n