Australian meat pie Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The Australian meat pie is a palm-sized snack of beef and gravy sealed in a worked pastry crust. Eaten one to a hand at a stall, a pub, or a football match, it is part of everyday life in this country.

The pie itself crossed the sea with the settlers. In 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived, a pie already appeared at a feast marking the King's birthday. The craft of sealing a filling in pastry and baking it came from Britain, and Australia began with that technique and that form handed down.

The beef that fills it came with the same fleet. Cattle landed in 1788, escaped and went wild, and a herd was rediscovered at the Cowpastures in 1795; by 1820 they numbered fifty thousand. Beef for eating grew abundant on the land, and the pie could be filled with it. Wheat, too, was grown locally through British-style farming.

The form particular to this country settled in the later nineteenth century. The filling firmed into beef and gravy, taking on a shape distinct from the British pie. Commercial bakeries such as Sargent's, founded in 1891, established mass production, and in the twentieth century factory pies like Four'N Twenty (1947) spread until the pie earned its place as a national food. In 2003 the sitting prime minister called it the "national dish."

Born in a gold-rush mining town: that is the origin story long told about the Australian meat pie. But follow the records, and the account that pins its birth to that single moment loses its footing.

The culture of selling pies in the street was already established before the gold rush of 1851. William Francis King (1807-1873), known by the nickname "the Flying Pieman," was hawking pies around Hyde Park and Circular Quay in Sydney from about 1834, and by the 1840s he was a local celebrity (Australian Dictionary of Biography). Before the miners ever crowded in, the pie eaten from the hand was already part of the city's scenery.

So who created the "Australian meat pie," and when? In the record, no person and no year answers the question. The pie itself dates from the 1788 settlement, the street snack from the 1830s and 1840s, the beef-and-gravy form of its own from the later nineteenth century; cut in anywhere, you never reach a single inventor or a single moment of invention.

What scholars see is not a set of rival origin claims. Rather, opinion converges on a single point: that there is no identifiable moment of invention to be found. The continuous process by which a form carried from Britain was gradually remade on this land is what the pie descends from. Once the tidy story of a gold-rush birth is set aside, what remains is an honest conclusion, that the very lack of a settled answer is the answer.