Hot stuff: The Pie Room recipe book
In a new cookery book, London’s pie king shares the secrets of an ancient British culinary art
Small but mighty, The Pie Room is where you go in London, pre- and post-lockdown, if, funnily enough, you want a decent pie. Of course there are bountiful envelopes of buttery pastry to be found across the capital but, since its opening in 2018, The Pie Room has become regarded by many as the best in the city.
Located on the side of the Holborn Dining Room, within the Rosewood London hotel, the compact workshop-cum-cookery school is led by executive chef Calum Franklin. It supplies the restaurant, also overseen by Franklin, hosts masterclasses, and can be booked for private dinners but, more than that, it is a hub of research and experimentation that draws diners from across the world, along with chefs keen to learn pastry skills, and keeps @chefcalum’s more than 100,000 Instagram followers salivating. Franklin’s debut book — a pie bible (Pie-ble?) no less — is published in September, and is the cookery book of the season.
The Pie Room is designed for home cooks rather than an “all-out, guns-blazing, chef-style book” that bamboozles with complex methods. Franklin teaches readers the basics of working with different types of dough and includes recipes ranging from traditional sausage rolls to ’nduja-filled brioche bites, by way of haggis Scotch eggs and a cheesy dauphinoise and caramelised onion pie. Not forgetting the chutneys, sauces and gravies you need alongside, and some mollifying cobblers and tarts for pudding.
The meticulous explanations are designed to avert common mistakes. “I think chefs on TV have put a sort of fear around pastry,” Franklin says, speaking on the phone one afternoon in June, while taking a break from delivering his restaurant’s creations to his local hospital (his lockdown project). “But it’s just flour and water and a bit of fat. Honestly, if you know the little details that make your life easier, all of a sudden it’s actually quite simple. I just want more people to make pies, that’s all.”
The capital’s pie king, 38, grew up in south-east London, the second of three boys. Their mother’s cooking was designed to fill them up. “Growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, I looked forward to McDonald’s as much as every other kid. I was not someone
putting marigolds as decoration on their food as a child.” He started washing up in a local restaurant at the end of school, only to find himself hooked on the kitchen’s hardworking ethos. His formative training came at Michelinstarred Chapter One in Kent, giving him the classical techniques to see him move on to restaurants including The Ivy. As senior sous chef at Roast in Borough Market, he discovered the joy of using many specialised suppliers, which stood him in good stead for his next role, at the Holborn Dining Room, which opened in 2014, and from where he sources produce from “weirdos like us who just focus on one thing and make it as good as possible.”
The Pie Room itself is a gem. A vast marble island dominates the space, which is glassfronted on one side so people can see in from the street and purchase pies to-go from a hatch, with most available wall space covered in thick wooden shelves displaying old copper moulds like artefacts. It was the discovery of one such curiously-shaped pie tin in the hotel’s basement that was a catalyst for Franklin’s fascination: “I brought it upstairs to the kitchen and showed everybody, and it’s a big team of chefs; as a collective, we could bore the backside off you about these modernist techniques we all understand, but here was something entrenched in history and none of us knew how to use it.”
In seeking a method to cook something in the vessel successfully (a mire of minute recipe adjustments, with much burning and undercooking), he lighted upon his now studious approach: Franklin can often be found in The British Library, swotting up. “We have 600 years of documented history on pies that is fairly unscratched — people don’t really delve into it that much. So for me, there was this wealth of information I could tap into. It allowed me to indulge my own enjoyment of food and to express individuality, which is the beauty of the pie. You can do that beautiful filling inside and then you’re left with a canvas on the outside to create something unique.”
The artistic side of pie-making — the idea a hearty dish can also be the subject of delicate decoration— is perhaps one that remains underrated. But Franklin is undeterred: “I think that’s happened historically in this country. There’ve been peaks and troughs in how a pie has been defined, periods where they’re the centrepieces of royal banquets, and then another hundred years where they went back to being very simple peasant food. We’re at a point now where we are trying to do that elevation again. But I’ll be honest with you, I appreciate a simple, well-made pie just as much as I do being able to lock myself in a kitchen for a few days and make the most elegant, crafted one.”
○ The Pie Room (Bloomsbury Absolute) by Calum Franklin is published on 24 September; £26
‘The beauty of the pie is you can do that beautiful filling inside and then you’re left with a canvas
on the outside to create something unique’