A Whole Pie, or Just a Piece

The oven sat at the back of the shop, brick built and fed with coal, and a badger baker in a flour-dusted apron worked the paddle in and out of it without once looking away from the fire. This kind of oven runs far hotter than a home oven ever could, hot enough to blister a crust in a few minutes flat.

The shop opened in nineteen oh five in a neighborhood full of new arrivals from Italy, most of them earning too little to spend a whole day's food money on one round pie. So the baker began cutting the pies into wedges and selling them one at a time, wrapped in paper to keep the grease off busy hands. It caught on so completely that most people now picture that single wedge before they picture the whole pie it came from.

Little about the method has changed since. The dough still rests overnight, the sauce still goes on cold, and the cheese still melts in patches rather than in one even sheet, because a coal fire runs hotter in some spots than others and nobody has ever tried to fix that.

A line of animals waited by the counter, coins ready, none of them in any hurry despite the smell filling the whole street outside. Polly perched on the window ledge and watched one slice after another disappear before it had even finished cooling, folded once down the middle the way regulars always eat it.