‘To tell the truth,’ says Peter Myers, his Cumbrian baritone untouched by four decades of life in Manhattan, ‘I’m glad it’s all over.’ By ‘it’ he means Christmas and new year, when Myers, the sausage-knotter and purveyor of pies to New Yorkers, is at his busiest. ‘It was bedlam. They began to queue up outside the shop ten days before Christmas for their mince pies. We were making thousands a day. Bedlam, I tell you’.
Myers of Keswick, the shop on Hudson Street that bears the name of his birthplace, is not your average butcher’s. Looking round the shelves stocked with salad cream, Colman’s mustard, Marmite, Jaffa Cakes, Branston pickle, HP Sauce, Lyle’s golden syrup, sherbet fountains and oatcakes, it is not, strictly speaking, a butcher’s at all. It is a slice of English life, real or imagined, in the West Village which happens also to make pork pies, sausage rolls, scotch eggs, Cornish pasties and, of course, Cumberland sausages. ‘We advertise them as the best Cumberland sausages west of Allonby,’ says Myers. ‘We have a few imitators but ours are the only ones made by a Cumbrian.’
As thousands of British people living in New York know, Myers of Keswick is more than a source of comfort food. Since he set up camp on 4 July 1985 (‘I sold one pork pie that day’), its owner has become an unofficial British consul, who has seen the great and good, and the not so good, use his shop as their retreat. He has been befriended by Keith Richards, celebrated in print by the novelist Kinky Friedman. ‘Kate Winslet lives round the corner,’ he says. ‘A nice lass, intelligent, well-rounded. And modest with it.’ Nowadays his customers include pop stars whose names are unfamiliar to Myers. ‘I read about them in the gossip columns, but I’ve no idea who they are.’
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