Cracking Good
Not five minutes after waking, I begin to think of food. Lately, my first meal of the day is some sort of eggy scramble with flecks of green vegetable and toasted seed bread on the side. Plus ketchup. Don’t judge me.
This week I awake wanting pie: meat, mushroom and gravy filled. To my great fortune, I am in the UK where the pasties are plentiful, people drink beer with brekkie, and less fortunately, summer is a four letter word.
My mate indulges me and takes us to Urban Pie in Birmingham’s answer to Yonge-Dundas Square, the Bullring. This cheap and cheery eatery, one of two such in the UK, is clad in earthy tones: long wooden slabs for tables, walls decked out in two-by-fours.
All this matchy-matchy immediately puts to mind deeply golden pucks of pastry. I walk up to the case mesmerized by tonal trickery, order the steak and mushroom pie with mash and a crispy onion garnish, all slathered in gravy and served in a waxy cardboard box. A symphony of beige.
The first bite involves cracking the crust. This is exciting, but I contain myself in solidarity with the molten filling so magically withheld. “It’s good,” I mumble to my friend. My internal monologue reading more like “hu-mana hu-mana,” I greedily empty the entire contents of the box down my pie-hole.
Today, back home, I return to my morning standard. Please, no tears. But the dream of one day stumbling upon a pasty shop in my fair city begins.