The Pie Room: chef Calum Franklin gives savoury pies a whole new lease of life
- The Pie Room cookbook, by Calum Franklin, celebrates the ‘skills and discipline’ needed to make a good pie
- It features recipes for classics such as beef Wellington, as well as more modern, international and vegetarian pies
In modern times, British pies have had a rather fusty image. At posh restaurants serving traditional British cuisine, where the roast beef with Yorkshire pudding is carved tableside, menus list savoury dishes such as steak and kidney pie, pork pie and beef Wellington. At pubs and in the frozen food sections of supermarkets, you might find sausage rolls, shepherd’s pie and Cornish pasties, while at Christmas, mince pies are sold everywhere from bakeries to grocery shops.
Then along came Calum Franklin and savoury pies were given a whole new lease of life.
I first noticed the chef’s pies on his Instagram feed. They were gorgeous, with decorations that were complex and modern, and fillings that sounded enticing.
In the introduction to The Pie Room (2020), Franklin, executive chef of the Holborn Dining Room, in London, writes that he started making pies by chance, when, in the deepest corners of a storeroom, he found a mysterious tin that had been tucked away and forgotten.
“At first inspection I had no idea what it was for, let alone what era it was from. It turned out to be a complex pie tin with interlocking parts and keys and it intrigued me. I took it up to the main kitchen and asked my chefs if they had ever used one before and quickly realised that I had identified a gap in our knowledge.