Meat pies

Meat pie

Australian meat pie with tomato sauce
Type	Savory pie
Place of origin	United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand
Main ingredients	Meat

A meat pie is a pie with a filling of meat and often other savory ingredients. They are popular in the United Kingdom,Ghana, Nigeria, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, , Zimbabwe and South Africa.

The beginnings of the meat pie can be traced back to the Neolithic Period, around 9500 BC. The ancient Egyptians' diet featured basic pies made from oat, wheat, rye, and barley, and filled with honey and baked over hot coals.

These pies were eventually adopted by the Greeks, and it is there that a flour-water paste substance closely resembling pie pastry was created and was first filled with meat. In Greece, these pies were usually fried or cooked under coals. The Romans, tasting the delicacy from the Greeks, incorporated it into their own diet with few modifications. According to the records kept by the wealthy, Romans used a variety of meats, oysters, mussels, lampreys, and fish as filling and a mixture of flour, oil, and water to keep it in. This 'pastry' cover was not meant to be eaten and was thrown away.

In combination with the spread of Roman roads, the invading crusaders encountered the dish and brought the recipes to Medieval Europe. In Northern Europe, cooks created the pastry using fats like lard and butter to make stiff dough to hold an upright pie. These medieval pastry dishes were called "coffins/coffyns", which means a basket or box. According to Janet Clarkson in Pie: A Global History, the "coffins" were:

Some historians suggest the tough, almost inedible, crust was given to the servants while the lords and ladies of the house ate the contents.

This pastry became a staple dish in medieval times, and was eventually called "pyes" or "pies". The origin of this name comes from the type of meat commonly used as filling. Beef, lamb, and duck were employed, but a majority of the time it was the magpie that was the main ingredient. Magpies in medieval England were originally named pies. Some historians think that the popular usage of 'pie' birds led to the pastry dish being named pie as well, while etymologists suggest that pies were named after these birds "from a supposed resemblance between the miscellaneous contents of pies and the assortment of objects collected by thieving magpies." The first use of the word "pie" as food is referenced in 1303 by the Oxford English Dictionary; also stating that the term became popular and widely utilized by 1362.