“Strange pie that is almost a passion,
O passion immoral for pie!”

Richard Le Gallienne’s 1899 verse might well explain why I found myself in the Yorkshire cathedral city of Ripon, 230 miles from home on a piercingly bright February day, watching the hustle and bustle of shoppers under a blue sky in the market square.

The previous summer, I'd been in York with an hour to kill. On Lendal, a street just off the main drag of shops where the tourists and shoppers roam, I peered through a shop window, the glint of traditional gilded lettering catching my eye. Taking in the dozens of little pork pies, neatly stacked, I snapped up a couple of these lattice-topped pies for the train journey home.

As soon as I bit into one, I immediately wished I’d bought half a dozen more. Trying not to shed crumbs on the train table, I felt transported by the crisp, light shards of pastry, tender pork and soft, juicy jelly. These elusive pork pies are what led me to Ripon six months later, to Appleton’s, the traditional pork butchers which have been selling them since 1867.

Blinding, late-winter sun reflecting off the shop window, it was only once inside that I could take in the sheer extent of their offerings: golden Scotch eggs in a precarious mound, trays of sausage rolls, their caramelised juices oozing out of the sides, big round faggots the size of a clenched fist and their infamous ham. Some offerings, like the chicken liver parfait, were new—to Ripon at least—and others, made new again, like the brawn, a traditional, almost historical, pigs’ head terrine made using a laborious process which stretches over several days.

Anthony Sterne greets me at the butcher’s shop; Anthony, along with his wife Isabel, purchased the Ripon store in 2010 from Roger Gaunt. Before that, the shop had been in the Gaunt family for three generations, his grandfather Jonas having purchased the business from the Appleton family in 1920.

***

Wearing a pair of borrowed wellies, we make a trip in Anthony’s Land Rover to a sunny, muddy field just ten minutes from the shop in Ripon. The sheep bound over first, heads down in the trough that Anthony has just replenished, until they’re displaced by gorgeous Hereford cows with amber hair and dreamy cream-coloured curly mops, like bovine Timothée Chalamets.

In her 1864 book The Casket, Marian S Carson waxes lyrical about “the rotundity of the pieman” describing someone who “is plump and gross—lusty but not corpulent.” Anthony, it’s fair to say, is neither rotund or plump, but cuts a trim figure when in his butcher’s apron. When he tells me the head of his giant Hereford bull that comes impressively ambling over weighs as much as he does, I believe him.

“I wasn’t very sporty like my brothers,” Anthony tells me. “In big families, you have to find your niche.” It was an early desire to make money that eventually led him to find food; working for his dad’s meat business as a teenager, he often fulfilled the deliveries. “I used to go and visit a lot of really nice commercial kitchens to drop off the meat,” he recalls. “I’d always want to hang around and see what was going on, I found that a fascinating world. [I loved] when they started converting the meat that we’d brought into delicious things.”

In 2003, Anthony—who, up until then had been working as a development chef for Pret a Manger in London—moved back to Yorkshire and set up the pie business I’s Pies, taking inspiration from the gourmet pies he encountered during a year in Australia, post-university. Working in the food industry had left him feeling “a bit disenchanted with the way things purport to be something they’re not,” he says, and I’s Pies was his opportunity to create food to his unstinting standards. “Everything was completely natural, cooked from scratch, we made our beef stocks, poached our chicken, pastry was all butter,” he adds.

Five years after its inception and by then stocked in Waitrose and Booths, I's Pies needed an office manager. Isabel had just moved back to Ripon after various roles in office management and facilities and took the position. A chance conversation ended up changing their paths a couple of years later. “A friend of mine told me that Appleton's was on the market and in passing I mentioned it to Anthony,” Isabel recounts.

By this point, Anthony had found that balancing quality and profit was tricky for a wholesale business, “I had the skills to do things really well but I wasn’t charging enough. We could have used frozen spinach or pre-prepared onions, but you end up with a product that just isn’t what you wanted. It didn’t interest me to cut corners.” he says.

Anthony bought Appleton's in 2010 and he and Isabel—by now a couple—were married four years later. Isabel remembers accompanying her parents to Appleton’s on shopping trips as a child “Getting ham and pork pies [there], it was an institution. It’s a very old established traditional butchers,” Isabel explains. “And we need to be mindful of that.”

From balancing quality and profit at I's Pies, their challenge at Appleton’s now was managing the expectations of a fiercely loyal customer base. “Everybody thought that we had changed things,” Anthony explains. “You had customers come in and say, ‘I know you changed the recipe but you’ve changed it back so I’m really happy’ but we hadn’t changed anything!”

Perfecting the Appleton’s pork pie recipe was another learning curve, much of the knowledge had been contained in muscle memory and refined over decades, as Anthony recalls. “Things weren’t very clearly documented,” he says. “It was all ‘a spoonful of this’, ‘put it in that tub and it weighs 6lb 8’, but that includes the tub!”

““Everything was completely natural, cooked from scratch, we made our beef stocks, poached our chicken, pastry was all butter.””

— Anthony Sterne

A meticulous approach was paramount, as even small changes made a huge difference. With a hot water crust the water is usually added at the start, but when they started production “the pastry was fine but it wasn't quite the same,” Anthony tells me. Previous owner, Roger Gaunt, was on hand to advise in their first year, which is how they found the missing detail that made all the difference. “It’s pretty unusual, we add hot water at the start which is what most people do, but then you add more hot water further along in the process as well.”

***

Wrapped up in the pork pie’s hot water crust are magic, mystery, and history too. Pork pies crop up in Charles’ Dickens’ Great Expectations, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)—Jerome K’s account of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames—and not forgetting the slightly fantastical version of a pork pie which makes an appearance in Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

A distant cousin of the French pâté en croûte, the pork pie stems from the medieval tradition of cooking meat in a pastry to preserve it. In those days, as with the Cornish pasty, the pastry would have been a mere protective layer, discarded when eating.

The first recorded recipe for a pork pie—“Mylat of Pork”—was in the kitchen of the court of King Richard II, in 1390. Instructing the reader to “hewe pork al to pecys” (cut pork all to pieces) it contained cheese, saffron, pine nuts and eggs and wouldn’t have born much resemblance to the pork pie we know today.

By the 1800s, the Victorian impulse to classify and organise ensured that sweet was firmly separated from savoury in the cooking traditions of the British. At that point, the pie had set up residence in the national consciousness as a humble, rustic food; country fare, eaten on hunts—but whether pies were actually taken hunting is disputed.

The most commonly known pork pie is the Melton Mowbray, which originated in 1831 in Lancashire. Appleton’s, as befitting a Yorkshire pork pie, are slightly different to that of their rival county; made with pink cured meat as opposed to uncured, which goes greyish when baked. The other difference in the Yorkshire pie is that it doesn’t use a wooden dolly—the cylindrical wooden block against which Melton Mowbray pie pastry is moulded.

When I ask Anthony what distinguishes Appleton’s pies from the Melton Mowbray—aside from the two-step pastry process—he demurs, explaining that he’s only ever made this pork pie. “Ours are intense, you can get [away with] a thinner pastry; Melton Mowbray has to be quite stout. Personally I like a light, thin, crispy pastry which is what we’re aiming for,” he says, diplomatically.

***

In the Appleton’s new cavernous food production unit, I meet Steve Harper, their new Head of Food. Of Appleton’s, Steve explains it’s the “Best ham I’ve ever eaten.” We stand around a table in white coats and hairnets sampling an incredible chicken and bacon pie, the highlight of which is a perfect whisper of tarragon, a subtle flavour that won’t upset Appleton’s traditionalists.

“That’s down to going into the mix cold, so on a reheat, it bleeds through and permeates, otherwise, you lose the flavour,” Steve explains. Formerly of Betty’s Tea Rooms, a York institution, Steve possesses a creative palate and a meticulousness which undoubtedly makes him an asset. As well as expert in product development, Steve, brought on in January, has also been taking stock of processes. “The biggest challenge we've got is how to control things but also have that craft element, rather than being automated and exact, because it shouldn't be,” he says.

As they’ve expanded—with shops in Wetherby, Boroughbridge and York, as well as the original Ripon store and a Knaresborough shop in the pipeline—the temptation to bake everything off-site and bring it to the shops presented itself, but that would mean losing some of the magic. “The smell coming in from the back, people coming into the shop and getting a freshly-baked pork pie, the bit of jelly dribbling down the chin,” Anthony describes, in mouth-watering detail.

***

There’s a line in a Rick Stein’s Coast to Coast cookbook which has always stuck with me. I’ll paraphrase because he butchered the French, but he asks us to imagine if cauliflower cheese was called something like chou-fleur à la Tomme de Savoie fermière. The kind of dish this evokes illustrates to what extent we fail to exalt our home-grown dishes in the way that we venerate foodstuffs such as arancini from Italy, or tapenade from France.

The pork pie is labour-intensive to make, with a jelly layer that is almost anachronistic, yet it's a direct link to our Victorian past, and one that is available from a supermarket. Anthony and Isabel are obviously conscious of carefully preserving this heritage. Speaking to them, there's a sense that they view themselves almost as custodians of the recipes and foods, while ensuring they're the best they can be, so they don't become dusty relics or footnotes in culinary history. Until I saw the taut strings of sausages hanging from the Appleton's counters, I'd never even heard of polony, a distant relative of baloney which was first mentioned in books in 1661.

That's not to say they don't have an eye on the future too, they had a tentative moment with pastrami, “hot-smoked for hours and hours and sliced in the shop”, as well as air-dried hams. These experiments might not always be a hit with a customer that demands tradition, but their chicken liver parfait is one venture that has proved successful.

“It's got Madeira, port, brandy, lots of shallots. It’s great to test something like that,” Anthony says. “If it works and people appreciate that, despite it being expensive, then we can do that.” You can tell that even after ten years, Anthony gets a big kick out of the simple pleasure of producing excellent quality food without having to cut corners, “you want to do stuff you're proud of really.”