Pie and mash is a traditional working-class food, originating in the Docks of London. Often accompanied with jellied eels, the dish has been popularised as “a Cockney classic”. It typically consists of a minced beef pie, mashed potato, and a parsley sauce known as liquor. Pie, mash and eel shops have been in London since the 19th century, and are still common in East and South London, and in many parts of Kent and Essex.
The main dish sold is pie and mash, a minced-beef and cold-water-pastry pie served with mashed potato. There should be two types of pastry used; the bottom or base should be suet pastry and the top can be rough puff or short. It is common for the mashed potato to be spread around one side of the plate and for a type of parsley sauce to be present. This is commonly called “liquor sauce” or simply “liquor” (liquor as in a liquid in which something has been steeped or cooked), traditionally made using the water kept from the preparation of the stewed eels. However, many shops no longer use stewed eel water in their parsley liquor. The sauce traditionally has a green colour, from the parsley.
Before shops became common, trading took place from braziers or carts. It was not until late Victorian times that shops began to appear. The first recorded shop was Henry Blanchard’s at 101 Union Street in Southwark in 1844 which was described as an “Eel Pie House”. The shops have become part of the local community and heritage of their area; for example, L. Manze in Walthamstow became Grade II listed by English Heritage in 2013 due to its architectural and cultural significance. Traditionally, pie and mash shops have white tile walls with mirrors, and marble floors, tables and work tops, all of which are easy to clean. They give the shops, never called restaurants or café, a late Victorian or Art Deco appearance. Because of the large number of pleasure boat steamer companies offering Sunday trips on the River Thames, many Eastenders used them to explore the more gentrified west of London. The result was that many also wanted their traditional foods of ale and pie and mash, resulting in the renaming of both a hotel that they frequently visited and the island on which it sat in Twickenham to Eel Pie Island in the early 1900s.
With the gentrification of South and East London as well as the docklands area, there have been significant socio-economic and demographic changes in the London neighbourhoods traditionally most associated with pie and mash. Through the 2020s, industry experts continue to note that affluent new locals are now more interested in “lattes and paninis” than a dish typically associated with working-class Londoners. As a result of the declining customer base, historic and famous pie and mash shops including L. Manze in Walthamstow have been forced to close and their premises taken over by new incumbents. In May 2023, for example, the iconic Grade II listed art-deco building at 9 Broadway Market in Hackney, which had been home to F. Cooke’s pie and mash shop for the previous 120 years, was taken over by Cubitts, a company that designs and handcrafts bespoke eyewear. W.J. Arments Eel & Pie House at Walworth, founded in 1914, with its glazed tiled walls, marble table tops, opening sash windows and a floor covered with sawdust, is one of the few shops to have thrived in the changing socio-economic climate. Proposals have been raised in the British Parliament to declare a Traditional speciality guaranteed label for the dish.
