Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs by Norman Jacobs Page A

only one flavour – plain. But they came with a little blue bag of salt that you had to undo and sprinkle over the crisps yourself, except that most times you couldn’t because the salt had got damp and would just fall out of the bag in one lump. But we still loved the crisps whether they were all equally salted or not. Willis’s was also where my parents would buy our Easter Eggs – it was such a thrill to see mine on Easter morning with curly white icing spelling out my name on the chocolate.
    A little further along was Arthur Toms, noted eel and pie house. This was where we bought our pie and mash and eel liquor, the only takeaway we had in those days. Whenever we decided to have pie and mash, I would be sent off with a large basin and a jug to buy this ambrosia of the gods. The pies and mash would be put into the basin and the liquor poured into the jug. Pie ’n’ mash and eel liquor was a longstanding cockney tradition dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Originally, the pie filling was eel caught in the River Thames but gradually meat took over as a filling and they were made from any meat that was cheap and available. By the twentieth century, the pie had become standardised to contain minced beef.
    The pie itself is a normal pastry but it is important that, while it is firm and crusty on top, the bottom has to be soft. Originally, the accompanying liquor was made from the water used to cook the eels in, flavoured and coloured with parsley. Even after eels were no longer used as the filling, the liquor was still made with eel stock. Before starting on it, the pie had to be opened at the top and a liberal dose of vinegar poured in. The whole meal was then eaten with a spoon and fork, never a knife. In common with all other Pie & Mash shops, Toms continued the eel tradition by selling jellied eels as an additional accompaniment or a separate snack. These were eels chopped into rounds and boiled in water and vinegar and then allowed to cool. As eels are naturally gelatinous the cooking process released jelly, which solidified on cooling. This was bolstered by some aspic jelly made from eel bones and the whole dish was served up in a small bowl with vinegar and a liberal dose of pepper.
    As an alternative to having cold jellied eels, you could have the eel stewed and eat it while still warm. In the front window of the shop was a large tray of live eels, wriggling away for all they were worth. If you wanted one with your pie and mash, you told Mr Toms which one you wanted and he’d hoick it out of the tray, cut its head off and drop it into a vat of steaming water. A few minutes later, it would be done to perfection, taken out of the vat and chopped into rounds to make a tasty supplement to your meal. Although we usually bought our pie and mash to take home, we did sometimes eat in the shop, and, here again, Arthur Toms followed the age-old tradition of white-tiled walls, a black-and-white patterned mosaic floor and marble-topped tables laid out in rows with bench seats on either side.
    I still hold to the view that pie and mash is the best food in the world, even if nowadays you don’t have to take your own jug and basin along to the shop.
    There were two more grocer’s shops on the left-hand side of the road, Tesco and Victor Value. When we first started using them, they were just like any other grocer’s shop of the period, with the assistant fetching your shopping for you from the shelf or the stockroom. If you wanted a lot of shopping, it was normal to have it all written down and to hand the list to the assistant. However, quite early on, first Victor Value and then Tesco turned into self-service shops with baskets at the entrance so you could do the shopping yourself and take your purchases to the till. It was a completely novel idea but a sign of things to come. That there was an early Tesco ‘supermarket’ on Chatsworth Road was very appropriate as Jack