Sea Pie

sea pie (also known as pot pie) seems to have acquired its principal name because it was essentially shipboard food. It was a complete meal in a pan, cooked economically on top of a galley stove. It consisted of a good rich meat stew, with plenty of gravy. The boiled suet pudding which would have accompanied it on land, on shipboard became a suet paste layer laid on top of the stew to steam gently under a tightly fitting lid. Because of this top paste, it was called a ‘pie’ (sailing vessels did not generally have ovens until the 18th century, when navy ships carried ovens for officers’ fare). Sea pie was made by Yorkshire keelmen’s families who carried goods from the Humber Estuary onto the Yorkshire canal network, up to the mid-20th century. The keels were barges with huge square sails, which only occasionally ventured to sea. They had a little coal stove in their tiny cabins but no oven, so everything had to be fried or boiled. Harry Fletcher described sea pie in A Life on the Humber (1975):

Dad liked to make a sea-pie himself. We had a big oval iron pan into which he would put a rabbit, stewing beef and all the vegetables we had. It was cooked slowly on the fire, and then Dad made a suet dumpling the size of the pan, and we really gorged ourselves.