Britain and Ireland · Volume 35, The Pie, the Pluck and the Girder Drink

Macaroni Pie

Name: Macaroni Pie
Total time: 1 h
Yield: Makes about 4 individual pies
Cuisine: Scotland, the Lowlands and the Central Belt
Ingredients: 250g plain flour; 100g lard; 110ml water; a pinch a pinch of salt; 250g dried macaroni; 40g butter; 40g plain flour; 300ml milk, warmed; 1 tsp mustard; 200g strong, mature cheddar

Dundee, then nationwide

Macaroni pie: a single round pie with a deep golden hot water crust cut open to reveal creamy macaroni cheese inside, resting on a wooden board.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 1 hour

Researched: 10 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Macaroni cheese sealed inside hot water crust pastry, traceable almost decade by decade to Hays bakers of Dundee in June 1920. The pie that nearly disappeared when Greggs dropped it in 2015, and came back on public demand.

by Dundee, then nationwide

A single end or a room and kitchen, a coal range kept lit from morning to night as the only source of heat, hot water and cooking, was the ordinary Glasgow working household for most of a century, and the food habits that grew out of it, stretching a Sunday joint into a Monday stovies, building a filling macaroni pie from little more than pasta, cheese sauce and pastry, were survival cooking made into permanent local taste rather than poverty imitating better food. Scots for a packed lunch, "a piece," entered popular memory permanently through Adam McNaughtan's 1960s song "The Jeely Piece Song," in which a mother in a new tower block throws a jam sandwich down to her child in the street below: gentle satire on the same slum clearance programme that was, at the time, meant to be improving exactly this kind of life. It is worth stating the region's public health record with the same care this atlas insists on everywhere else, rather than repeating the tabloid shorthand. Glasgow does carry a genuine, well documented excess mortality rate, higher than Liverpool or Manchester even after full statistical adjustment for deprivation, the so called Glasgow effect. What the research does not support is pinning that excess on diet alone: the fullest academic synthesis, a joint 2016 study from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, NHS Health Scotland, the University of the West of Scotland and UCL, points instead to deindustrialisation, political and policy vulnerability, and the fact that roughly half of the excess deaths under 65 relate directly to alcohol and drugs. A more recent academic reading argues the whole phenomenon is better called a political effect than a Glasgow one. This chapter treats the finding as real and the diet based explanation for it as unproven, because that is what the evidence actually shows.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes about 4 individual pies. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

For the pastry

250g plain flour
100g lard
110ml water
a pinch a pinch of salt

For the filling

250g dried macaroni
40g butter
40g plain flour
300ml milk, warmed
1 tsp mustard
200g strong, mature cheddar

Method

Make the pastry as a hot water crust in the same manner as the Scotch pie: bring the lard to the boil in the water, pour into the flour and salt, and mix to a smooth, hot dough. Use it to line and top individual pie tins.
Boil the macaroni until just tender.
Make a roux with the butter and flour, cook out, then let down with the warmed milk to a thick sauce.
Season with the mustard and melt the cheddar through off the heat.
Combine the sauce with the cooked macaroni, fill the lined pie cases, and top with the pastry lid.
Bake at 200°C for around 35 minutes until the crust is fully coloured.

What a modern chef changes

A blended two-cheese béchamel, and pasta cooked to finish inside the pie

Rung 2

Method

Build the cheese sauce from a proper béchamel base finished not with a single cheddar but with a blend, a well aged farmhouse cheddar for depth and a little smoked cheese for a savoury note the plain version lacks.
Emulsify it smooth in a high power blender rather than simply stirring it through, for a sauce that holds its texture without splitting once baked.
Cook the macaroni slightly under, so it finishes setting inside the pie itself rather than turning soft.
Bake the pies in a Big Green Egg for a drier, more even crust colour than most domestic ovens give a pastry this thick.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists