Pie and mash: London's eel-shop plate, and how to order it

Overview

Pie and mash is the plate London’s working poor built for themselves, and almost nothing else in this book is as specifically the city’s own. It is a small minced-beef pie, a scoop of mashed potato, and a ladle of pale green liquor poured over both — and that green sauce is the part that confuses everyone who did not grow up with it.

Liquor is not alcoholic and never was. It is a thin parsley sauce, historically made with the water left from stewing eels, thickened and turned vivid green with chopped parsley. That eel connection is the whole origin of the dish, and it is documented rather than legendary: eels ran thick in the Thames and its filthy tidal reaches when little else edible would, they were cheap, they kept, and they fed the East End when meat could not. The pie-and-mash shop grew straight out of the eel trade, which is why the two things — pies and eels — still share a counter wherever the old form survives.

The shops themselves are the other half of what the dish is. The classic room is late Victorian or Edwardian: white tiles to head height, marble-topped benches bolted to the floor, mirrored walls, a tiled or mosaic sign. Sawdust on the floor is a folk memory now more than a fixture, but the tiling and the fixed benches are real, and eating the plate in one of these rooms is a different thing from eating it anywhere else. There are only a handful of the genuine old shops left, mostly in the East End and south of the river, and the number falls every few years — which is worth knowing before you assume you can find one on any high street.

What to order

The base order is exactly what the shops are named for: pie and mash. Say it plainly. If you want the full traditional plate you add the sauce — “pie, mash and liquor” — and in a proper shop the liquor comes as standard unless you refuse it, so you rarely have to ask.

The counting language is worth knowing because it is quick and it is how regulars speak. A plate is described by its parts: “one and one” is one pie and one mash, “two and one” is two pies and one scoop, “two and two” two of each. A hungry order is just more pies. It is not a secret code and nobody will test you on it, but ordering “one and one” instead of “a pie and mash please” is the difference between reading the room and not.

Then the eels, which are the reason the shop exists and which most visitors skip. There are two forms and they are not the same dish:

• stewed eels — served hot, in the same green liquor, the eel cut into rounds on the bone. This is the gentler introduction: warm, mild, close in flavour to the pie plate.
• jellied eels — cooked, then cooled so the stock sets into a savoury jelly around the pieces, and eaten cold. This is the one that divides people. It is a genuine East End taste and it is worth trying precisely because it is disappearing, but go in knowing it is cold, gelatinous and bony, not a fried fish.

On the table you will find chilli vinegar — malt vinegar steeped with dried chillies — and this is the correct condiment, not brown sauce or ketchup. A shake of it across the liquor is how the plate is actually eaten. Salt and white pepper, and that is the whole range.

What to avoid

The thing to avoid is not a bad shop so much as the wrong thing wearing the name. A gastropub or a market stall selling a tall, glossy, all-butter pie with a named craft ale in the filling and a smear of “pea purée” is selling something real, but it is not this. Pie and mash is a deliberately plain, cheap plate; the shop version has a soft-bottomed pastry that half-dissolves into the mash and liquor, not a crisp free-standing crust. If it arrives looking like a restaurant dish, you have ordered a restaurant dish.

Be wary of a menu that has grown a page of fillings — chicken and mushroom, steak and ale, a vegan option, a chorizo something. The old shops do minced beef, and the honest ones do little else; a long fillings list is the tell that the kitchen is chasing a different, wider trade. The same goes for a shop that has quietly dropped the eels: the eels are unglamorous and slow to sell, so they are the first thing to go when a place is drifting from the form, and their absence tells you what a place thinks it is.

One genuine caution rather than a snobbery: the liquor is not always eel-based any more. Plenty of shops now make it with a plain flour-and-parsley sauce, which is fine and often what a modern kitchen prefers, but if the eel stock matters to you, that is the thing to ask about, and it is a fair question that a real shop will answer straight.

Practicalities

A plate of pie and mash with liquor is one of the cheapest hot meals in the city, and that is central to what it is — figure on roughly £5 to £8 for a single pie and mash, a little more for two pies, and eels priced separately by the portion. A number much above that, or a “pie board” served on slate with a side salad, means you have left the eel-shop tradition and entered its gentrified cousin; neither is wrong, but they are different plates at different prices and it is worth knowing which one you are being sold.

The plate is lunch, overwhelmingly. The old shops open in the morning and close in the early or mid afternoon — many are shut by three and closed on Sundays — so this is not an evening meal and not a late one, and a shop still serving at eight in the evening is by definition not one of the traditional ones. If you want the real room, go at midday on a weekday.

Cash still has a slightly longer life here than in the London the city guide describes: the oldest shops were cash-only within living memory and a few keep a card minimum, so a small note in your pocket saves a moment, even though most now take contactless like everywhere else. And eat the plate hot and quickly — the liquor thickens and dulls as it cools, and the soft pastry is at its point for only the first few minutes, which is exactly why it was built to be eaten fast at a fixed marble bench and not carried anywhere.