British Pie Week 2022: Peterborough pie maker shop remembered in week dedicated to tasty pastries

British Pie Week is a celebration of the humble pie - found everywhere from your local pub to fine dining restaurants.

Whether it’s a cottage pie, pork pie or pie and mash, the pastry encrusted treats are one of the UK’s biggest contributions to the world of food.

This week - for British Pie Week - all things pie-related are being celebrated between March 7 to March 13, so the Peterborough Telegraph is fondly remembering the city's past and present butchers and pie makers.

The family-run Franks Brothers Butchers had a shop in Peterborough city centre for more than 130 years before the Westgate Arcade shop was closed in 2014.

Now, Andrew Frank and his son Alex have set up a unit in The Square off Vicarage Farm Road - in Fengate - and the award winning sausages are still being made there today.

According to the British Pie Awards, which are themselves a focal point of the celebration, we eat £1 billion worth of pies in the UK every year.

The organisation, which is led by The Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, says pies evolved out of pasties in Britain but might have first been cooked by the Egyptians or Romans.

Their first mention in British history is by author of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, who gave a recipe for an apple pie in 1381.

Other pie recipes from a similar time appear in the recipe books of King Richard II’s cooks and different types of pie have sprung up ever since, with the filling often dependent on the local area they are found in.

Take a look at some of this paper's archive pictures taken of the former Frank Brothers Butchers shop in the Westgate Arcade - do you remember it?