Pie Floater

I’m pleased to report some progress with research on the pie floater, a meat pie served in a sea of pea soup with a slash of tomato sauce. I have learned it is not unique to South Australia; Joanna Savage informs me that it used to be available in Brisbane in the early 1960s, and it seems also to have been sold at Broken Hill (New South Wales, but almost in South Australia). And Laura Mason alerted me to the ‘pie and peas’ suppers in Yorkshire, and to the mushy peas which are commonly sold as a take-away by English pie shops and fish-and-chip shops.

The exact origins of the pie floater in South Australia—who and where and when—are blurred in a swirl of faded memories and vague hearsay, but I believe it could have been simply the result of fortuitous proximity. Pie stalls, which had been around since at least the 1870s, were often associated with another form of fast food, mashed peas. Louis Stone’s novel, Jonah, set in Sydney in the early 1900s, describes ‘a basin full of green peas, boiled to a squashy mass’ which were eaten sprinkled with pepper and vinegar (vinegar was an alternative to tomato sauce in the early days of pie floater, too). Yet another street food, saveloys, were also eaten with mashed peas. It’s not necessarily obvious, but one can understand the progression to a pie in thick pea soup.

As for the name, an English slang compendium (John S. Farmer and W.E. Henley, eds., Slang and its Analogues Past and Present, volume III, 1893) records ‘floater’ as a suet dumpling in soup. According to Stephen Massil, in Suffolk something similar is known as a ‘Suffolk swimmer’. This he describes from an experience in a cafe in Walberswick near Southwold as a ‘dumpling that sat atop a winter broth and almost filled the bowl. They refused to divulge the recipe which may have included suet.’ Logically, then, a pie on a puree of peas, or in a thick pea soup, should be called a pie floater. It might be an adaptation and progression of an English custom, but unless anyone has evidence to the contrary, I can claim it as authentically Australian. [BS]