Melton Mowbray Pork Pie

There is a moment on Boxing Day, somewhere around mid-morning, when the kitchen is cold and the house is quiet, and someone opens the fridge and finds the pie. It has been sitting there since yesterday, the jelly set firm, the crust golden and solid. Someone cuts a wedge. Then another. A cold pork pie at eleven in the morning, standing at the counter with a dab of mustard and nobody watching, is one of the more civilised pleasures this country has produced.

This is not a weeknight recipe. I won't pretend otherwise. A Melton Mowbray pork pie asks for an afternoon of your attention, a willingness to get your hands into warm dough, and the patience to let the whole thing set overnight before you cut into it. But the reward is something no shop-bought pie will give you: a hand-raised crust, golden and slightly bow-sided because you shaped it yourself, filled with rough-chopped pork that tastes of the animal and not the curing salt, held together with a trembling layer of savoury jelly made from bones and time.

The meat stays grey when it cooks. This is correct. This is what uncured pork does, and it is the mark of a proper Melton Mowbray. The pink, uniform filling of a factory pie comes from nitrates and machines. Yours will look different. It will taste of pork.

I make one every December. The notebook has a page for it: 'Pork pie. Boxing Day. The crust held.' That was a good year. The year it didn't is also in there, because honesty matters in a notebook. The pie still tasted right. It just looked like it had been in an argument.