Pie and mash-up

I love M&S food. A lot of people do. Although I still vaguely resent them for delisting their Chicken Tikka sandwich many years ago (bring it back).

Yet perhaps even more baffling than that scandalous decision is the latest addition to its Gastropub range, which revealed itself in the newspapers yesterday morning, like a belated April Fool. Behold, the M&S fish and chips pie!

Made from cod, mushy peas, tartar sauce, surrounded by shortcrust pastry and topped off with chips, it’s like the Department of Health’s worst nightmare. Their nerves have probably only just settled back down after that whole cheeseburger pizza drama, and now this.

Calm down, says an M&S spokesman, explaining that these Brundle-pies are “slightly lower in calories than most pies, and have around half the amount found in a take-away fish and chip supper”.

Well, yes. They ought to. Most pies aren’t filled with healthy fish and peas, they are filled with the cheaper, fattier, cuts of meat and gravy and topped with a pastry lid. And, unless you have a gargantuan appetite, a fish supper from any decent chippy is enough to feed two. And the whole lot is deep fried. And I’m not even going to mention scraps.

“Each pie contains 581 calories and includes 31g of fat,” continues M&S, undeterred. Well, the ultimate benchmark in a situation like this is the Big Mac, and Ronald McDonald’s flagship burger contains 490 calories and 26g of fat. Hmm.

Ultimately though, it’s not about nutrition. We are talking about a pie, so how could it be? As the famous song suggests, pies are never good for the waistline. Yet this one could be amazing for mine because I wouldn’t buy it. I love fish and chips. I love pies. But I can imagine how they might taste if you welded them together – and it just doesn’t taste good. It tastes like fish and chips with some pastry on the side. Why would you?

Fair play to M&S for jumping on the food mash-up bandwagon to grab some Cronut-style PR for itself. Although it should be remembered that M&S has form for the improbable combination. It dreamed up the infamous lasagne sandwich way back in 2010, years before the croissant and the doughnut got together. Perhaps its motives are pure?

And perhaps this launch will throw open the floodgates. Will Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s et al suddenly feel inspired to chuck improbable combinations of food together and hope some of them stick?

Let’s hope so. Exciting combinations of ingredients that come together in perfect harmony is what great recipes are about, after all. In fact, in recent years, the more improbable the combination the better, if the global success of Heston Blumenthal is anything to go by.

So even if I don’t like the look of the fish and chips pie, I hope everyone that works in food development, including M&S, keeps on experimenting with different flavours, ingredients and techniques for years to come. And good luck to them if they do, even if they don’t always get it quite right. If they ever get tired of experimenting, they can always bring back the Chicken Tikka sandwich. It was pretty simple stuff. But it was absolutely delicious.