The Great Meat Pie Demise

Hardly matters what anyone bloody well says, the Nigerian meat pie is in a bad way.

I grew up on fantastic meat pies. There was nothing quite like it. It didn’t particularly matter if you had them hot or cold, they were perfect. For the first couple of years we had those semi-circular mounds of folded dough with the fork imprints down the outer crust. The IBB years brought us the triangular shaped, flakier meat pies. I recall a surprise samoosa attack launched in the early to mid-90s which was beaten back after heavy fighting in Shell Housing Estate, Port Harcourt. It didn’t matter what was thrown at us—sausage, scotch egg, egg roll, danish, doughnut—we beat it back.

Meat pies were consistent. The perfect ratio of potato, beef, carrot and seasoning. Occasionally one came across an amateur creation, its distinct telltale sign the excessiveness of potato in the filling. But other than these rare cases, it was meat pie heaven. Nigeria was meat pie country.

And that was before the Great Mr Biggs Meat Pies.

You don’t really know what a meat pie is if you never had a Mr Biggs Meat Pie in its heyday. We capitalise the ‘meat pie’ in Mr Biggs Meat Pie for a reason. To say it was in a class of is own is absurd: this was a mass produced piece of food heaven. I remember there was an AGIP filling station in front of Tejuosho Market, between Ojuelegba and the railway line in Yaba. The promise of a warm pie was the only reason I could tolerate the interminable unpleasantness of a day at the market with my mother. It was more than just food, it was a cultural totem.

These days what passes for meat pie are dry, unimaginative, vulgar, insulting pieces of thick dough. That’s if you find it. In 2017 we stopped the pretense altogether. In many otherwise fine establishments the meat pie has been eradicated by an invasive species known as the sharwarma. We have lost a great many things in this country, and our meat pies may be the most tragic of all.