Pie Floater - Details

Details

The 'Pie Floater' was originally created during the 'Great Depression' to feed members of the population who had left their farms to try and find work in Sydney. Many of them found themselves homeless and unable to feed themselves or their families so food and pie manufacturers would donate their 'left-overs' to soup-kitchens, who would then add a pie to a bowl of soup. The most popular at the time was pea and ham soup, as it was easy and cheap to make and had more nutritional value than most other soups being made at the time due to the limited availability of produce. The most famous place in Australia to get a 'Pie Floater' is Harry's Cafe De Wheels, originally set near the graving docks(Now Australian Naval Dockyards known as 'Garden Island Naval Base' Woolloomooloo), east of the Sydney Opera House. This was the site of the first 'Harry's Cafe De Wheels' as there was such a concentration of unemployed workers in that area who needed a cheap, but nutritional, meal to sustain both themselves, and in some cases, their families. The most popular version of the Pie Floater, these days, is a traditional meat pie with mushy peas set on top with a depression made in it to make a bowl where gravy is poured onto it. The addition of the pea soup provides extra flavour and dietary fibre, and extends what otherwise may be considered a snack to a full meal. Anthony Bourdain, Joe Cocker, Billy Connolly, Nigel Mansell, Shane Warne and Angus Young are high profile fans of the pie floater.

In 2003, the pie floater was recognised as a South Australian Heritage Icon by the National Trust of Australia.

The pie floater is probably best known in the metropolitan areas of the capital cities of South Australia and New South Wales.

Across the rest of Australia, a similar taste experience can be found in a pea pie, a meat pie with a layer of mushy peas under the crust, often sold at local bakeries. A variation on the pie floater is to substitute the pea soup with mushy peas.

The pie floater also makes an appearance in the Discworld novel The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett, where it is sold by Fair Go Dibbler, one of a number of similar characters who sell "regional delicacies" across the Disc.

Read more about this topic:  Pie Floater

Famous quotes containing the word details:

    Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.
    Jeanne Elium (20th century)

    Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.
    Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)