Egg and Bacon Pie

Saturday morning. The kitchen is cold because nobody has been in it yet. The oven goes on first, then the kettle. Somewhere between the first cup of tea and the second, you start making pastry, rubbing butter into flour with your fingertips while the bacon spits gently in a pan behind you. This is the rhythm of an egg and bacon pie.

It's not a quiche. I want to be clear about that. A quiche is mostly custard with things in it. This is a pie with whole eggs cracked straight onto the bacon, their yolks sitting there like small golden surprises waiting for whoever cuts the first slice. A little cream poured around them, some parsley if you've got it, a lid of pastry brushed with egg and baked until the whole thing goes the colour of a good autumn afternoon. We're only making dinner. Or breakfast. Or something to wrap in a tea towel and take to the park.

The beauty of this pie is that itbelongs to no single occasion. Warm from the oven on a Saturday with brown sauce on the table, or cold from the fridge on a Tuesday evening when you can't face cooking again. It keeps. It travels. It feeds people without any fuss, which is, I think, the highest thing food can do.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago with a single line underneath: "Better cold. Don't tell anyone." I stand by it, but the warm version has its own argument to make.