Markets and Pie and Mash shops seem to
go together, and it's not without reason that this is so.
The two pie and mash shops that
predominated in Lambeth and Waterloo were Burroughs at 146 Lambeth Walk and R
Cooke's at 84 The Cut, both, sadly now gone.
Previous to shops selling produce, pies and live
eels were sold in the street to passers-by; the piemen were a regular
site on London's streets, even being included in a nursery rhyme
“
Simple Simon”.
Much of the meat and eels that were
used was of dubious quality, the eels sometimes being dead a long
time before being prepared and these were mixed in with live eel meat
. In those days the resulting food poisoning could be fatal. In
order to sometimes get rid of old stock, the piemen would indulge in
the game of 'tossing the pieman' in which people, usually boys, would
toss a coin and if the pieman won he took the money but if the person
won he got a pie for free, if the piemen gave them dubious pies, it
was a win/win situation for them.
The first recorded Eel and Pie shop was
at 101 Union Street, Southwark, just a slip and a slither away from
the New Cut Market; Henry Blanchard is listed in Kelly's street
directories in 1844 as selling a variety of pies offering fillings
such as Eels, meats or fruits, these were sold for a penny each. In
addition to this, live Eels, pea soup and mashed potato were also
sold.
Freshly prepared eels in a clean-looking environment (tiled
walls and floors) meant many people gravitated to these places rather
than run the risk of food poisoning with the pieman.
The rise of the Eel and pie shop
heralded the end of the pieman and their counterparts in the Eel
trade; the damage that was done to their trade was so dramatic that it was noted in
Henry Mayhew's “London Labour and London Poor”.
Thirty years after Blanchard opened his
first shop, Kelly's Directory listed 33 eel and pie shops in London.
This began the growth of what Londoners came to know as the “Pie
and Mash shop”.
Helped, in part, by immigrants from
Italy and Ireland, many of the shops that opened are still around
today.
Robert Cooke is first recorded as
opening his shop on Bakers Row in Clerkenwell in 1889 with his second
wife Martha and his children: Robert, Amy and Fred. The shop was
situated near the market in Clerkenwell. The long term success of the
firm is attributed to hard, work, sharp business accumen and the
training of the family within the trade. Cooke's opened a shop in
The Cut at number 84 in 1938.
Michaele Manze (Mike) was an Italian
from Ravello, his Mother, father and three brothers came to England
in 1878 after walking from Ravello to Naples to catch a boat.
Primarily the family worked in the Ice business; Mike met and
befriended Robert Cooke, who introduced him to his daughter from his
first marriage: Ada. Mike and Ada married and opened up their first
shop in Bermondsey.
The reason, apparently, for Pie and
Mash shops having only a fork and a spoon comes from either of two
origins: one being that during the First World War, there were a
shortage of knives and the people going into the pie and mash shops
would take the knives they had home with them; another story goes
that the knives were withdrawn from being served after people used
them as weapons when they fought.
The last forty plus years have seen a
demise in the pie and mash shop owing to culinary cultural changes
plus the migration of large numbers of the working class out of
London to areas such as Kent and Essex. These movements can be traced
as many of the known remaining names in pie and mash Such as
Cooke and
Manze (as well as
newer names) have opened up shops to cater for them as this directory of the various shops on the website
“
Pie and Mash Club” shows.
