With some new products, the moment you see them, you wonder that no-one has come up with them before.
This is not such a product.
There are five flavours, four of which are blameless: creaming soda, raspberry, feijoa sour and bubble gum.
The fifth is mince and cheese.
Let me just clarify that.
An innovative local company has somehow formulated and is offering for sale as a cordial, the essence of a mince and cheese pie.
I am not making this up.
A pie is a fine thing, and an ancient one. There are pies in Shakespeare’s works. There were pies in ancient Rome.
The origin of the word pie is lost in time’s labyrinth, though scholars have speculated that it may derive from the European magpie’s habit of amassing bright objects, as if filling a pie.
And no, I’m not convinced either.
The pie has always been an unpretentious thing.
It can be eaten on the go, without cutlery or ceremony.
Like a sandwich or a hamburger it is grippable, though it should carry a warning against being eaten while driving — superheated cheese on the crotch does little for the steering.
In this country, the pie is emphatically the people’s food, an egalitarian emblem.
There is even a semi-serious campaign to have the mince and cheese declared New Zealand’s official national dish.
In recent years the pie has poshed up and diversified — tenderloin of quail au jus de truffe, that sort of thing — but the old staples still dominate the warmer: steak, steak and mushroom, steak and cheese, mince and the quintessential mince and cheese.
I remember with clarity my first Kiwi mince and cheese, the one that formed my mental blueprint.
It was the winter of 1987.
I had been only a few months in the country and a colleague invited me to Lancaster Park to watch Canterbury play rugby.
It was the same world as now and yet different.
In a bitter wind we joined the crowd on the concrete terrace opposite the main stand.
The pre-match entertainment consisted of a man in a sheep’s head running the length of the stadium and a troupe of dancing girls sponsored by a local radio station.
Their legs were putty-like with the cold and they struggled to keep time, partly because of the Tannoy system and partly because of the mud.
I remember nothing of the rugby, but I do recall the crowd repeatedly letting the ref know they’d been doing it all day.
At halftime we bought pies from a cart with a glass warmer.
I can see my pie now, can feel its heft.
It came in a crinkled cellophane wrapper that had become semi-opaque.
The pie seemed to weigh more than it had any right to, as if forged in the core of some distant star.
I slid it half out of its wrapper.
The pastry top was a glistening invitation. The base was the pallid skin of a corpse.
I was about to bite into it when my colleague stayed my hand.
‘‘She’ll be warm,’’ he said.
I nibbled a corner and discovered the local talent for understatement.
A proper bite would have blistered the tongue.
We were back in the core of that distant star.
But once the pie had cooled it made the perfect food for a winter afternoon.
Fat, meat, cheese: it sat in the belly like a small furnace.
I’ve eaten hundreds since.
And now people claim to have captured its essence.
I inspected a bottle at the local supermarket.
The liquid contents were the colour of gravy and what seemed to be gobbets of cheese had gathered in the neck.
And my gorge twitched reflexively at the sight, as in that moment when you are not yet sea-sick but know with certainty you soon will be.
I sensed a transgression of aesthetic law, an inharmonious clash between cordial and meat, between savoury and sweet, between solid and liquid.
The thing offended some immutable canon of right and wrong laid down in the mouth of man. I wished it god speed and put it back on the shelf.
Not everything needs to be invented.
- Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
