Pie Fidelity
  • Published: 23 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9780141986739
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99

Pie Fidelity

In Defence of British Food

Formats & editions
EBook
28 Mar 2019
Paperback
23 Apr 2020
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A passionate, heartfelt journey through British food and the formative dishes that made a nation

In Britain, we have always had an awkward relationship with food. We've been told for so long that we are terrible cooks and yet according to a recent YouGov survey, our traditional food and drink are more important than the monarchy and at least as significant as our landscape and national monuments in defining a collective notion of who we are. Taking nine archetypically British dishes - Pie and Peas, A Cheese Sandwich, Fish and Chips, Spag Bol, Devonshire Cream Tea, Curry, The Full English, The Sunday Roast and a Crumble with Custard - and examining them in their perfect context, Pete Brown reveals just how fundamental food is to our sense of identity, perhaps even our sense of pride, and the ways in which we understand our place in the world.
  • Published: 23 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9780141986739
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Pete Brown

Pete Brown is a British author, journalist, blogger and broadcaster specialising in food and drink, especially the fun parts like beer and cider. His broad, fresh approach takes in social history, cultural commentary, travel writing, personal discovery and natural history, and his words are always delivered with the warmth and wit you’d expect from a great night down the pub. He writes for newspapers and magazines around the world and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme. He was named British Beer Writer of the Year in 2009, 2012 and 2016, and Fortnum & Mason Online Drinks Writer of the Year in 2015. In 2017 he won Best Drink Book at the same awards with The Pub: A Cultural Institution. He lives in London.

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Praise for Pie Fidelity

Brilliant, funny... loving every page

Dave Myers, The Hairy Bikers

Brown is a natural raconteur... this memoir mixed with a "defence of British food" sees him at his funniest and most insightful. Highly recommended

Sunday Times, Food Book of the Month

As much as his book is a reflection of his experiences, reading it inevitably leads the reader to examine their own past, and how food defines who we are, or used to be

Waitrose Weekend Magazine

[Praise for The Apple Orchard] Delightful... impassioned, patriotic, richly informed

Sunday Times

[Praise for The Apple Orchard] Wonderful, revelatory ... very moving

Sheila Dillon, BBC Radio 4

[Praise for The Apple Orchard] An absorbing love letter to the English apple tree...lyrical and joyful

TLS

Part Nigel Slater, part Bill Bryson, and wholly delicious...Funny, informative and written with passion, Pie Fidelity is a love poem to all that's great in British cooking.

Mail on Sunday

The book examines a series of traditional British meals with Hornby's geeky obsessiveness and Orwell's incisive class observation ... His prose is engaging, his storytelling effortless ... Brown writes beautifully and fondly of every dish in a way that will have you desperate to taste it again at the end of each chapter. This historical information he weaves around the food is plentiful, accurate and worn lightly, and his observations are fresh and provocative.

Financial Times

Genuinely revealing...Brown evokes the emotionalism of eating

Guardian

A heart-felt book that makes an important point without false pride or sentimentality. When it comes to food, we're better than we think.

The Times