Beetle Pie? WTF is going on at RFFMT? Is this the month of disgusting sounding food? Well, maybe…but I also just got sent a copy of The Nightmare Before Dinner: Recipes to Die For: The Beetle House Cookbook by Zach Neil and couldn’t wait a year for Hallowe’en to share a recipe with you.
And as with last week’s Stuffed Monkey, the yumminess of the Beetle Pie is directly proportional to the yechhhh factor of its name. That is to say….it’s totally delicious. Let me convince you by unpacking it into its component parts:
- Chocolate wafer crust
- Pistachio custard filling
- Blackberry jam topping
- Whipped cream and fresh blackberries to garnish
Yeah, baby!
There are so many things to talk about this week. I really want to tell you about the book that contained the Beetle Pie recipe but that will have to wait. Because while researching this post I came across an absolutely bonkers tale from history involving a very different type of beetle pie.
So buckle in….because we are taking a trip in the way back machine all the way to 1863.
1863 was a huge year in history. In America, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. The Red Cross was founded in Switzerland. And, in London, the first tube train ran between Paddington and Farringdon. And some five miles away from Paddington, in Brixton, Mrs Elizabeth Wilton baked a pie for her neighbour’s coachman, Edward Gardiner.
The relationship between these neighbours was…..strained. Mrs Wilton liked to have German bands (and Negro singers) playing loud music in her house a few times a week. This was not appreciated by the neighbourhood in general and her sickly, elderly neighbour specifically. Words were exchanged. And sometimes more than words. On one occasion, Mrs Wilton was seen throwing bricks at the neighbour’s windows! She was feisty!
She was also batshit crazy! One day, she baked the German band a pie. They took it to the local pub to eat. However, the pie was not filled with apples or rhubarb or cherries. Or anything normal. Because this was a pie baked by Elizabeth Wilton who was as mad as a box of frogs.
The pie filling was a pair of ladies knickers!
Not to be outdone, one of the band members then donned the knickers, returned to Mrs Wilton’s house and danced in front of her door for a while.
I imagine that dance looking a little like this:
Loud music? Brick throwing? Underwear pies? Revenge door dancing? It’s 1863 people! Calm the hell down and go catch one of those newfangled tube trains. We won’t be needing your kind of mad arse white trashery until we invent reality tv in about 120 years!
But all this is merely to set the context under which the hapless Edward Gardiner received his pie.
Now, I don’t pretend to know anything about the life of coachmen in 1863 but from what happened next, I’m guessing it was hungry work. Or maybe, they didn’t get paid a lot so hunger was par for the course. Or maybe Edward Gardiner was just not too quick on the uptake. Because despite the lingerie pie precedent, it took him a good “six or seven mouthfuls” of Mr’s Wilton’s pie before he realised that
- It tasted revolting
- It was filled with black beetles and,
- “A nasty stuff resembling mustard, but it was not mustard.”
The “nasty stuff” was later discovered to be gamboge, a yellow tree sap used as a laxative.
Not So Fast Eddie eventually took what was left of the pie to the local police station. Where the sergeant claimed to have never seen “anything more filthy or disgusting” and that he had to open all the police station windows to get rid of the “intolerable stench”.
Let me just repeat. The sergeant took one whiff. Eddie G? Six (or seven) mouthfuls…
The next day, Mrs Wilton turned up at the police station bearing…..yep…you guessed it. A freshly baked pie!
Which upon examination was found to contain a painted toy pear.
Which was found to be full of black beetles!
Later, in court, Mrs Wilton admitted having made the original beetle pie “as a lark”.
The judge agreed that it was a practical joke and not meant to cause injury and she was released from custody.
A few months later the irrepressible Mrs Wilton was back in the police station. This time she was charged with knocking off a policeman’s hat whilst being drunk in public.
I love this woman!!!!!😍😍😍
There is no record of whether she baked the charging officer one of her very special pies!
I hope you loved the story of the utterly eccentric Elizabeth Wilton and her black beetle pies as much as I did!
I found the entire story on The Skittish Library. It’s a fabulous site, why not pop over and see what other delights Estelle has to offer!
And make a beetle pie in celebration of Elizabeth Wilton and her pie making badassery from 1863!
Have a great week!
The profiteroles only happened because the very special occasion was a long weekend due to the Football Grand Final being the next day. I know right. Who has a holiday BEFORE the big day?
