Forbidden pleasure: an ode to the great Aussie meat pie

The meat pie’s loveliness depends in great part on its forbidden nature, writes Steve Waterson. Picture: Glenn Hampson

Just after the Sydney Olympics, when the airfares dropped to merely stratospheric, my younger brother came to visit from Brazil, where he was teaching English and studying capoeira, the locals’ balletic martial art.

Early in his stay I was tied up at work one day, but a dear family friend, Bob “the dreaded” Oxenbould, offered to show Jez around the city.

I returned that evening to find them purring like lions on the couch, beaming with lazy satisfaction. “We’ve had a wonderful time,” they said in unison.

What was the highlight, I asked – the bridge, the Opera House? “I think maybe the one beneath Milsons Point station,” my brother replied, to a nod of assent from Bob, who had decided to ditch the tourist cliches and had taken Jez on a tour of his favourite pie shops.

That was no surprise to me, having first seen Bob, a large man, in action at Sylvester’s bakery in Cessnock in the NSW Hunter Valley with my father-in-law. “Three plain pies, please, Nicholas,” he’d say to the owner, “and two for you, Len?” On the way home through the vineyards they’d inspect each other’s clothing for the treacherous flakes and crumbs that would invite a lecture from their wives.

Bob, Len and Sylvester’s are all gone now, but the memory of those pies still gives me a twinge of nostalgic indigestion.

The meat pie’s loveliness depends in great part on its forbidden nature. My wife Sally tries (bless her!) to restrict my pie-eating to bona-fide journeys, immune to my pleadings that the daily commute to the office counts as a road trip.

This Christmas, however, we travelled south, and what an enticing panorama of greed opened up before me.

Curiously, pretty well every bakery in the land boasts an “Australia’s Best Pie!” award, which always merits investigation. It doesn’t make sense that they could all be number one, but to the devout pie-worshipper it’s an article of faith, a religious paradox, a logical impossibility but true at the same time.

It is therefore heretical, and certainly dangerous, to declare favourites, although it’s amazing how often I have needed to stop for fuel at Ulladulla. “You’ve still got three-quarters of a tank,” Sally says, “and this is not a petrol station.”

Elsewhere, don’t the words “in the sky” provoke excitement? Put the word “pie” before them and, oh my goodness, a rhyming delight, a delicious collision between poetry and pastry dotted all over the map, from Bilpin to Tumut, Cowan to Olinda.

Where believers disagree is on the filling, a tense sectarian divide. There’s a popular place I patronise despite the fact that the owner hates kidney and refuses to include it, cheating me of a lifelong favourite. My daughters are on his side – “it tastes like wee”, according to their sophisticated palates – and blame my offal addiction on my 1960s childhood in northern England where, it’s true, many of the important food groups had much the same flavour and appearance before and after consumption.

Temperature is another contentious point: is scalding essential to the experience, an exquisite agony to push the tastebuds into the paroxysms of sensual awareness celebrated by the 18th century French patissier and libertine, the Marquis de Sade? (He’d have called it a pithivier, of course, the old pervert.)

People point to health issues, but – astonishingly – not always in a positive way. For my part, I see the pie as a warm, tasty, oversize, golden tablet that you take to ensure a long and comfortable old age. I’m not a doctor, though, so my medical advice (like any other advice I offer) should be disregarded with contempt and abuse; but I believe the pie’s artery-clogging properties are more than counterbalanced by the life-enhancing happiness it generates.

My brother, incidentally, inspired by that distant, glorious day, founded a new martial art he calls pai chi, whose fluid movements trace the sweep of one hand holding a pie as it passes tantalisingly close to the mouth, while the other rubs the belly in spiritual contentment.

Following his advice (every bit as worthless as my own), I have incorporated the discipline into my daily fatness regime.