In Tasmania, I came to the conclusion that Chicken Parmo must be the National dish (except they call it a Parmi).
Every second pub seems to sell it there.

100%!

I can remember, as a kid, visiting Stanforths Celebrated Pork Pie Establishment and buying "savoury duck" which was a kind of spiced meat loaf. My dad would take me mushrooming at first light on Sunday morning after which we would breakfast on said mushrooms and fried slices of savoury duck. Delicious!

He would also sometimes fry thick slices of corned beef until they had a crisp crust on the outside but were still soft in the middle.

Stanforths also used to sell large smoked sausages called Polony which I can't recall seeing anymore.

My dad was also a great lover of corned beef, or "bully beef" as he called it, would just slice it straight from the tin and have it at least once a week with chips and salad and I have to say, its pretty good with Heinz salad cream



But polony, hated it as a kid, a non-descript sausage in a red skin that tasted of nothing in particular (from memory) but was always of a very mushy consistency as if they were scared to leave any reminder of what it might have been.

Speaking of pork pie, I have recently discovered Andrew Jones pork pies. The one with black pudding in particular.

And for Mystic Yed, their address says Huddersfield if that's of interest.

Not a great fan of Greggs, personally, often seems too greasy to me. Cooplands is much nicer.

Yes, mine called it "bully beef" too, I think it was a throwback to his army days. I remember him telling me how he used to fry up on the body of his bren gun carrier just with the heat of the desert sun. I like it in sandwiches with plenty of onion.



That's the stuff, apparently it's quite an old british dish related to mortadella etc. It's probably very variable in quality depending on who made it. I don't think I liked it either, but I love a good quality mortadella now.

Morrisons used to sell Andrew Jones Pies and I loved them. Can't seem to find them now.

My sister in law is based in Rome and works in the middle east. Whenever she comes to stop at ours she wants fish and chips, a bacon sandwich and a good pork pie (not necessarily all on the same plate). She liked the Andrew Jones pie so much that she took some back to Italy to show the locals!

Nothing like a good pork pie is there, I grew addicted to them when I first left school and went to work in a surveyors office which just happened to be next door to a general grocers shop who also did sandwiches - every morning at 10am he'd get his delivery of pork pies from a local butcher and every morning at 10.05 the surveyor I worked for would send me down the fire escape to buy two pork pies while he put the kettle on.

Still warm pork pie with the fat still runny inside, can't tell you how many tender documents we ruined by dribbling pork fat/gelatine all over them.

And as for a bacon sandwich, its probably the only food I'd kill for...

As far as pies are concerned, I've still yet to find one, beef or pork, that could rival Hyde's pies of Hessle Road, Hull. His minced beef pies had an amazing mix of spices and the pork pies had none of that jelly shoite in 'em. But the best thing was the pastry, a thin and crispy shortcrust.

True.
When I was apprenticed, I spent 12 weeks in the Heat Treatment Dept and 12 more in Metallurgy.
Both these departments gave me access to the annealing furnaces, especially the one where the lid could be lifted to put a growler from the trolley into the "wire mesh for small items" just inside the lid, to warm it up.
As I recall the temperature was well over 200 deg.C and it used to crisp-up the pastry in no time and you didn't have a great deal of leeway on the timing ... but a re-crisped pie takes some beating.

Even later on, when I was a trainee in IT (or EDP as we called it back then) nearby, I'd occasionally detour slightly on my way to fetch something from the front offices and one of the blokes would put my pie in the furnace for me to pick up on my way back.

Can't even imagine H&S allowing that now.

I know for a fact that welders rod ovens are used as pie warmers.