Gala Pie with Boiled Eggs

There's a Saturday in April, sometimes March if the year is kind, when the light changes. The mornings are still cold but the afternoons have warmth in them, and you start thinking about eating outside. Not a barbecue. Not yet. Something you can carry in a basket, slice with a knife, eat with your hands on a blanket that still smells of last year's grass stains. This is the pie for that day.

Gala pie. The name comes from the miners' galas of the north, those big community celebrations where food had to travel, feed a crowd, and taste right at any temperature. A rectangular pork pie with boiled eggs set through the middle like a seam of gold, so every slice reveals a neat disc of white and yellow against the pink, peppered meat. It's a generous, sociable thing. Nobody makes a gala pie for one.

The pastry is hot water crust: lard, boiling water, flour, brought together in a saucepan and worked while still warm. It's not delicate. It's not supposed to be. This is pastry built to hold, to travel, to be cut with a pocket knife on a hillside. The filling is seasoned pork, simple and honest, and the whole thing sets around a jelly made from good stock that fills every gap and seals every air pocket. I wrote it down in the notebook last Easter: "Gala pie. Took it to the field. Came back empty-handed." Best compliment there is.

It wants a bit of time, this one. An afternoon's quiet work, the kind where the radio is on and you're not in a hurry. But the reward is something you can carry into the next day, slice after slice, each cut looking like a small celebration. Right food, right evening. Or right afternoon, in this case, with the sun on your face and a good knife in your hand.