A Ziggurat of Carbs and Fat–the Wigan Kebab

The first online mention of the phrase “Wigan Kebab” that I can find is from a December, 2004 blog post entitled “Pies: a second helping.” In it, the author claims that the Wigan Kebab is 4 pies on a stick–I’ve seen this claim elsewhere, but that is not the most common usage. The Urban Dictionary entry, posted just two months later in February of 2005, gets it right, at least as far as I’m concerned: “meat and potato pie in a barm cake.” “Barm” is a word used in British English* to describe the frothy buildup atop an actively fermenting beer, wine, mead, what have you. Barm cake describes a kind of soft bread roll that may or may not be made using this yeast, but there are several other terms–batch, cob, bap, etc.–that are used in various parts of England to describe bread rolls that are so similar as to be nearly identical.

_{* “British English” is a phrase that a lot of Brits like to yell at me about, because they feel that English is their language and everybody else gets it wrong. However, it is useful iwhen making this type of distinction.}

In any case, in the area of England northwest of Manchester, “barm” is among the more acceptable terms, and a pie served in a buttered barm with HP sauce, ketchup, mushy peas, gravy, malt vinegar, or some combination of these condiments, has come to be known as a Wigan kebab. Though “pie barm”–first appearing online, again to my knowledge, in a 2007 Guardian interview with Damon Gough of Badly Drawn Boy fame (is fame the right word?)–is another valid term for the treat.

I’m not sure when I first read about the Wigan Kebab. I do remember that I had a vague awareness of it already when this video blew up and brought widespread recognition to the phrase “Wigan Kebab.” In it, a very personable guy named Joe Gilmore visits a little restaurant–a chip shop or “chippy” in the parlance of the UK–called the Trawlerman to try not only the Wigan kebab, but some of the other unfamiliar local fare–the “smack barm,” a battered and fried potato slice served in a buttered bread roll with “pea wet” or the liquid from the top of a pot of mushy peas without much or any of the peas themselves; and the “babby’s yed” or baby’s head, a steak pudding, indented on top in a manner they must find reminiscent of the soft crown of an infant’s skull.

I remember the complicated mix of feelings I had watching this video–I was entertained by it obviously, and appreciative of the way Joe navigated the local cuisine in a way that communicated and found joy in its unfamiliarity without cheaply poking fun at it; but I was also furiously envious that it wasn’t me sitting in that far-off chippy, enjoying these delightfully fatty and carby comfort foods and bantering so easily with the chip shop man. I put “Pie barm” on our List immediately and determined to fly to England, visit Wigan, find that same chip shop, and have myself a Wigan Kebab.

That was November of 2019. A few months later, Covid 19 happened, and life changed for many of us. I canceled trips to Vietnam in March of 2020 and New York City in May. I switched to working remotely full time. I crawled inside a shell that I may never fully crawl out of, but by the time our alphabetical List of Sandwiches was rolling back around to the Ps for Pie Barm, I had begun traveling again–to Philadelphia in November 2021 and all the way to Iceland in December of 2021. A trip to England would have been impossible in January of 2022 so I cleverly renamed the entry “Pie Barm” to “Wigan Kebab” to push it back nearly a year, hoping I’d be able to pull a trip together.

Well I haven’t. That is an entire paragraph full of excuses. Could I have put together a trip to England by now? Maybe. Probably. Nobody is more disappointed that I haven’t than I am. However, as I’ve often told people, the majority of the traveling I do is via my own kitchen.

So I’ve just had to make the Wigan Kebab myself.

Pie

The typical chippy in Wigan–and in most of England for that matter–serves multiple types of pie. The menu might include steak pies, steak and kidney pies, “meat” pies (as opposed to steak pies), chicken and mushroom pies, cheese and onion pies, and the ubiquitous meat and potato pie. Some chippies in or near this area of England may also carry the Lancashire butter pie, also called a “Friday” pie or a “Catholic” pie, containing only potatoes, onions, and butter. It’s the meat and potato pie that is the usual choice for a Wigan Kebab though.

Chippies in general will be selling mass-produced pies rather than house-made–Pukka Pies is a major brand in England, as is Holland’s Pies. I sometimes buy meat pies at Winston’s Irish Market down the road from me (and in fact Winston’s is generally a good source of English condiments such as HP sauce). But I elected to make these meat and potato pies based mostly on this recipe, with a few flourishes (such as using a mixture of potatoes, waxy ones in large chunks to hold their shape and starchy ones chopped smaller to help thicken the pie filling). The ingredients go beyond just the named “meat and potatoes,” which some English folks seem to regard with suspicion–onion? In a meat and potato pie? Yes, and a little thyme as well, cooked down tender and thick and then stuffed into larded hot water pastry crust brushed with milk. They turned out well, I think.

Barm

A barm cake, often simply called “barm” for short, is a large, soft, round, and flattish bread roll like a bigger, less squishy hamburger bun. I suppose a Mexican telera might not be an unreasonable substitute but I chose instead to try making my own, cutting this recipe in half. These rolls did not turn out quite as soft as I’d hoped but they were just the right size for the pies I made.

Pie Barm

We start by cutting a barm in half

It has been made very clear to me by Brits in comments on various videos I’ve done that the bread for English sandwiches should always be buttered. I did not do a good job here of capturing the fact that I buttered the bread but if you look closely you can see a substantial swipe of Kerrygold butter (I’ve also been told I should use Lurpak but I happen to like Kerrygold) on both the bottom and top halves of the barm.

Here I encountered a dilemma. What condiment(s) to use? I’ve read of people using HP sauce or tomato ketchup, and mushy peas are a favorite as well. I was interested also to try this commercial mushroom ketchup product, which is made in the UK but won’t be found at too many chip shops. Brits actually prefer Heinz ketchup over other brands, but I was under the impression that the US version of Heinz used nearly twce as much sugar as the UK version so I bought some Irish Chef brand ketchup to approximate the lower-sugar product. I have since watched a Youtube video showing that the difference in sugar content is much less drastic. Mushy peas are made from dried marrowfat peas but Batchelor brand canned marrowfat peas were all I could source so I approximated the dish using these.

Since I made these first few pie barms and posted a TikTok video about them, I’ve seen comments from a number of Brits suggesting other condiments I hadn’t considered: pea wet (as opposed to the peas themselves), Bisto gravy, chip shop curry sauce, salt and vinegar, mint sauce. Plenty of people agreed with my first choice though, which was…

HP Sauce

HP sauce comes in a glass bottle and has a consistency and thickness reminiscent of a slightly thicker ketchup. Do you remember the days when ketchup came in glass bottles? You’d shake and shake that bottle, slap its bottom like you were a midwife, and the ketchup just didn’t seem to want to exit the cozy home it had made there in that glass cylinder.

These uneven strips of HP sauce are called “lashings” in British English, which I never really thought about before just now but I think must have something to do with the wrist movement made while shaking the bottle, a slight twist and snap as if cracking a whip, causing an unpredictable and oddly shaped amounts of sauce to quickly exit the bottle’s mouth.

The barms were the perfect circumference for the pies, but between the height of the bread and the pie, this Wigan Kebab was just too much to get my mouth around. A softer bread roll would, I think, compress itself around the pie nicely, but this somewhat more substantial roll was dense enough to smash the pie a bit as well. The HP sauce was a good combination with the oniony beef gravy and potato filling of the pie, that tamarind tartness and sweet date, that peppery hint of allspice or clove. It provides enough interest to take something that would otherwise be a fairly straightforward triple-hit of carbs (quadruple if you count the fact that there are 2 kinds of potatoes in it) and change things up enough to keep it interesting from bite to bite.

The Wigan Kebab with HP sauce is good, but can we do better?

Tomato Ketchup

My next attempt at the sandwich used Chef’s Ketchup as the only condiment, apart from the (clearly ubiquitous and required) butter on the bread.

First, to describe the Chef’s brand of ketchup. As I write this, I am tasting it side by side with the American version of Heinz ketchup and while I expected the Heinz to lead with sweetness and the Chef to lead with the vinegary kick and the bigger hit of spices I’d noticed when I first tried it, that isn’t exactly what I am tasting right now. The Chef brand does lead with big flavors–vinegar, spice, even a fairly substantial sweetness–while the Heinz ketchup tastes like… nothing? It feels muted in comparison. Based on nutrition information I found online, they seem to have roughly the same amount of carbs/sugars, but even the sweetness of the Heinz ketchup seems understated next to the big flavors of the Chef Ketchup.

So I am not a ketchup person in general, but I really enjoyed this particular brand of ketchup, and I thought it was equally good in the pie barm as the HP sauce–a brassier, more straightforward sweet/sour flavor than the darker HP sauce but providing a sharper contrast to the fat and carbs, carbs and fat of the Wigan Kebab.

Mushy Peas

To make mushy peas from the can of Marrowfat peas, I simply mixed in a touch of baking soda–a soak in sodium bicarbonate is what helps the peas get mushy–a splash of cream and a small knob of butter with the canned peas and heated them slowly until they fell apart in the pan.

For this sandwich, I spooned a generous amount of the mushy peas on top of the pie before closing the sandwich. Then, on a whim, I added a little bit of the mushroom ketchup, a thin, translucent, salty and spicy and deeply savory sauce more similar in texture to fish sauce than the thicker tomato ketchup we’re accustomed to.

Oh mushy peas. Where have you been all my life?

How can something so ordinary, so simple be so perfect? I am a fan of split pea soup, and the mushy peas are reminiscent of that to a certain extent, but minus the extras–the onions, the carrots, the smokey ham flavor. This is just pure pea, enhanced by a little salt, sugar, butter, and cream–and of course the umami machine that is mushroom ketchup. Still, they taste like sunshine, if sunshine were a sticky green mess of pea goo.

The mushy peas don’t really add any contrast to the pie barm. They don’t add sweetness or acidity or much in the way of texture different from the meat-and-potato goo already inside the pie. But they add sunshine and joy somehow. They make everything taste better, including themselves, and I do not care to explain that assertion scientifically.

Now I am told quite vehemently that I need to try a pie barm with gravy. Multiple Wigan lads have left comments and even short videos of their own as comments on my Wigan Kebab video (which I’ll embed below) to that effect. “Get some fookin’ gravy on that now,” says one fella. But as usual, no two Brits seem to like their sandwiches quite the same way. So I feel satisfied with having doubled down on the mushy peas when I ate that 4th pie.

But when I find my way to Wigan–and I feel I must one day–when I darken the doors of the Trawlerman if they’re still there slinging pies, smack barms, and babbys yed, perhaps then I will take mine with gravy.

@sandwichidiot I'm sure I'll hear the many ways I've gotten this wrong but hello again my British friends, I've made a pie barm! #wigankebab #piebarm #meatandpotatoes #hpsauce #mushypeas ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer