The Australian meat pie: a short history of a winter habit

On a cold morning the pie is the first thing your hands reach for — out of the oven too hot to hold, the pastry gone gold and blistered at the edges, steam finding the cold air the moment the top is broken. The Australian meat pie was never meant to be a refined thing. It is winter food, working food: a hot meal you can hold in one hand on the way to somewhere else.

A food that came out with the British

The pie did not start here. It came out with the British in the first years of the colony, when a pie was simply how you made a little meat go a long way and travel well. Those first pies were lamb or mutton, much like the ones left behind in England.

What made the pie Australian was the meat. As the flocks thinned and cattle spread, beef took the place of mutton, and the filling settled into the gravy-dark, minced-beef pie the country still eats. By the middle of the nineteenth century the pie had become ordinary — the food of anyone who worked outdoors and ate on their feet.

The pie and the diggings

A town built on a lead of gold

Chiltern knows that kind of eating. In 1858 a man named John Conness struck gold in the Indigo lead a few kilometres from here, and within a year a town of tents and hessian had thrown itself up over the diggings — some twenty thousand people at its height, a tenth of them Chinese. The street the bakery stands on still runs along the line of that lead, and still carries Conness's name.

Goldfields food had to be portable. A digger worked wet ground all day and bought what could be carried and eaten warm in the hand — and a pie, its pastry sealing the meat inside, was made for exactly that. The eating-tents and bake-houses of the diggings did a steady trade in them.

Why the Australian meat pie belongs to winter

Every food has its season, and the pie's is the cold one. It is hot all the way through, it holds its heat, and it asks nothing of you but a free hand. On a grey morning with frost still on the cars, a pie does the simple, immediate work of warming you from the inside out.

A different pie in every state

The country never settled on one pie any more than it settled on one football code. Each place bent the idea to what it had.

• In South Australia, the pie floater — a meat pie dropped into thick pea soup with a dab of tomato sauce — sold from pie carts on the streets of Adelaide since the 1870s, and named a South Australian Heritage Icon in 2003.
• In Tasmania, the scallop pie: local scallops in a mild curry sauce, sealed in pastry, a Hobart habit since the nineteenth century.
• In Victoria, the footy pie — handed over a counter at the ground and eaten standing up in the cold, the kind Four'N Twenty turned into a Saturday institution after 1947.

The plain pie

For all the variations, the one Daniel comes back to is the plain pie — no scallops, no curry, no soup, just beef and gravy under a lid of pastry, the version the diggers would recognise. It comes out of the same deck oven as the morning loaves, the four-a.m. bake we have written about before. On a cold day it is honest, it travels, and it is exactly enough.

Out of the cold

So the next time you are on the inland road in the cold — heading up for the snow, or taking the slow way home through the north-east — Chiltern is a good place to stop, and a pie is a good reason. The bread is out early, and the ovens are warm by the time the town is. Come in out of the cold, take a window table near Conness Street, and let the pastry do the rest.