A pie-bird (as they are called the UK) is a hollow ceramic device, traditionally from Europe and act as “steam vents” that have been placed in the centre of fruit and meat pies (while cooking) since Victorian times.
My mother had a blackbird with a yellow beak pointing directly out of the top of the pie and for most of my childhood I never even questioned its purpose.
Funnels are used in baking pies to prevent the pie from boiling over in the oven by allowing the steam to escape from inside the pie. They also support the pastry crust in the centre of the pie, so that it does not sink in the middle, and hence also known as ‘crustholders’.
The nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence refers to “Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie; when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing” but it is uncertain whether pie vents were designed to look as birds because of this song, or whether pie vents in fact existed earlier and the song was a reference to them. The Oxford English Dictionary comments that the word ‘pie’ itself (in the culinary sense) may be connected with ‘pie’ as the name of a variety of birds, in particular the magpie.
The first recorded pie funnel was manufactured in 1880 by Dean and Morris and it was made in three sizes. One of the earliest recorded figures was a blackbird, registered in 1933 in Australia by Grace Seccombe as a ‘Pie Crust Lifter’. AJ Wilkinson registered a blackbird pie funnel design in 1936 and many of these were produced, including the all white wartime version – some were stamped Wilkinson, Newport Pottery or, later, Midwinter.
I am a big fan of pies; particularly meat pies and so it seemed entirely sensible that I invest in my own pie-bird. Having just won the pie-bird below on ebay, I shall be making many pies in the near future.
So, to answer the question posed by this blog post, it will be I that has eaten all of the pies, and I am not ashamed to say it.
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