Life of pie

‘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.