Forfar Bridies

January rain on the windows and the oven already warm. That's when a bridie makes sense. Not a pasty, not a pie, not a sausage roll. A bridie. From Forfar, in Angus, where they've been making them long enough to have settled every argument about what goes inside.

The filling is chopped beef steak, onion, and suet. That's it. No potato, no swede, no carrot. If you put potato in a bridie, you've made a pasty and someone from Forfar will tell you so. The meat is chopped, never minced. This matters more than you'd think. Chopped steak has grain and texture; mince has neither. The suet melts through as it bakes, keeping everything rich and damp inside the pastry. Two holes in the crust means there's onion. One hole means plain. I've never understood the plain ones, but there it is.

The pastry is short, buttery, and wants to be rolled out without fuss. The shape is a horseshoe, crimped along the top, not folded along the side like a Cornish pasty. Every region has its geometry and Forfar's is this: a curved thing, golden brown, warm in the hand, deeply satisfying eaten standing up in a cold kitchen or wrapped in paper for a long walk.

I wrote it down in the notebook after the first time I made them at home: beef, onion, suet, pastry. Cold day. Good.