Pie and liquor

It's is British Pie Week and the Daily Telegraph has been profiling a Bermondsey Institution (left), Manze's pie and mash shop (see here).

When I came to be interviewed for the post of vicar in Bermondsey and I discovered they were serving the candidates pie and mash for lunch, I knew I had applied to the right parish.

Famously proper pie and mash is not served with gravy (though I quite like it with gravy), but with that traditional green parsley sauce, known by all Cockneys as 'liquor.' (Add some vinegar, and eat it with a spoon and fork if you want to do it properly).

Whether people in my line of business are particularly associated with pie and mash I don't know but it is undoubtedly true that Cockney rhyming slang for vicar is 'pie and liquor.'

I hear some lovely tributes at  Bermondsey funerals, but one I will always remember was the line from a poem by a twelve year old at her grandmother's funeral: 'Nan, you was the liquor on my pie.'

And everyone knew exactly what she meant.