Cockney feet mark the beat of history, sang Noël Coward, as if he had ever been east of Holborn. Yet the sugary wartime sentiment finds a moving and resonant echo in Melanie McGrath’s new work of social excavation. The past casts an unusually deep shadow over Bow. And, cleverly, she has found a fresh means of exploring these striated layers of heritage: through the enduring local appetite for minced beef pie, mashed potatoes, and side orders of stewed eels.
G. Kelly’s Pie and Mash is the 100-year- old restaurant in question, on the Roman Road in Bow (there are branches elsewhere). Pie and mash served with ‘liquor’ (parsley sauce) and eels might be described as the forerunner of fried chicken: comfort food devised at a time when comfort was badly needed. It ought now to be an anachronism; yet demand seems consistent. What might this tell us about the broader flow of East End history?
McGrath follows not only the Kellys, and those who worked with the firm across the generations — baking the pies, decapitating the skittish eels — but also the lives of their customers and the market traders all around.
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