Simple approach earns royal seal of approval for a prince among pies (From Darlington and Stockton Times)

Simple approach earns royal seal of approval for a prince among pies

1:49pm Friday 26th June 2009

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Ruth Campbell discovers what makes an Appleton pork pie so special.

THE people of Ripon have the game of cricket to thank for the fact that the best pork pies in Britain are baked in their home city, where they are sold fresh out of the oven from the butcher’s in the market square every day.

For if Roger Gaunt hadn’t spent so much time batting and bowling during his schooldays, he might have passed his A-levels and gone to teacher training college, as he had planned.

Instead, he was hauled back from boarding school in Bath to join the family business.

He was happy enough to do so, because pork pie-making is a skill which has been in his family for generations, and one he had picked up when working in their Appleton and Son butcher’s shop during school holidays.

Now aged 58, he is as passionate about pork pies as his father and grandfather were.

Mr Gaunt and his nine staff make 600 small, medium and large pies from the tiny premises every day, six days a week, putting the first trays in the oven at 7am.

Prince Charles loves them.

When he stays locally, Appleton’s supplies the pork pies.

The prince even popped into the shop unannounced to buy some himself a few years ago, and remarked on how much he enjoyed them.

The late Queen Mother is also believed to have eaten the pies when she stayed at nearby Studley Roger.

But, even better than this royal seal of approval are the crowds who queue round the block on a Saturday morning to buy this king of pork pies.

The customer who travels especially from Scarborough every week, and those who come regularly from Leeds, Durham and beyond just to stock up on his pork pies, are a true testament to just how tasty they are.

“I have customers who say they hate coming in here because half the housing estate says ‘get us a pie when you’re there’,” said Mr Gaunt.

It’s hardly surprising that one national newspaper recently described Appleton’s as “the best pork pies in Britain”.

Since then, Mr Gaunt has had tourists from Kent and London joining his regular queues, and the heads of one national chain of upmarket supermarkets admitted at a public meeting in the area that they “couldn’t compete with Appleton’s pork pies”.

This straightforward, nononsense Yorkshireman wouldn’t make a good celebrity chef. He doesn’t believe in having a website or PR. He refuses to do mail order or home deliveries.

Everything he bakes, he sells from the shop, and that’s just the way he likes it.

There are no gimmicks and no media-savvy advertising campaigns, viewed through the nostalgic haze of bygone, rural Yorkshire. These pork pies are, simply, the real deal.

Mr Gaunt, who used to supply Fenwick’s, in Newcastle, as well as all the northern area racecourses, now refuses to make them for anyone else.

Fed up with the rules and regulations and added complications attached to refrigerated vehicles and deliveries, he decided many years ago to cut out wholesale and concentrate on his own shop.

At the suggestion that he could make a small fortune supplying a supermarket with thousands of pork pies every week, he grimaces. He doesn’t want any more business.

If he expanded, he said, quality would drop. His pork pies would lose the very thing that makes them special. “I don’t believe in mass production.

Get too big and you take your eye off the ball. I want to be able to oversee it all,” he said.

He is an old-fashioned man.

He doesn’t even have a computer on the premises and records the week’s wages by hand in an old-fashioned ledger.

He prefers mental arithmetic to using calculators. “I haven’t needed a computer before, so why get one now?”

he asked. “Computers can be overworked, they get in the way.”

It’s the same traditional, hands-on approach he applies to his pies.

He said: “We use locallysourced pork; proper meat, left fairly rough, not minced and ground to a mush.” The seasoning, to Appleton’s own recipe, is a closely-guarded secret.

The pastry is just as important.

“It’s like a sweet; as well as a nice filling, the chocolate surrounding it has to taste good too. The pastry has to be of a good quality.”

Every day, he and his team make fresh hot water crust pastry, prepared using melted lard poured into the flour, which is then mixed and turned. This ensures the juices from the meat don’t leak into the wall of the pie.

The resulting pastry, which is skilfully kneaded, pummelled and shaped by hand, is thin and crispy, with none of the uncooked white gunge you find in so many pork pies.

After the pork is dropped into the pie, the lids are put on top using a hand blocker, and the pies are stacked on baking trays, ready for the oven.

After cooling, jelly is added through a hole in the lid and they are sold, still warm, direct from the shop.

Mr Gaunt also sells traditional pork sausages, black pudding, haslet (a type of meat loaf), polony (a dry sausage) and jellied brawn. “New flavours tend to come and go.

I believe in good, old-fashioned, straightforward food,”

he said.

His grandfather Jonas, who bought the business from the Appleton family in 1920, would be proud of him.

Sadly, Mr Gaunt’s son, who works in the media, and daughter, a carer, are not interested in taking over the family business.

He said: “They have their own lives. Hopefully, when the time comes, I will find someone with a similar passion who cares about it. You have to be passionate about it, you have to want to do it, otherwise there is no point.”

He presented me with a warm pork pie, fresh out of the oven. I could hardly tell him I didn’t like pork pies, and never ate them normally.

But I didn’t even have to pretend.

This was delicious, and very different to any of the other pork pies I had ever tasted.

I really do hope he finds someone good enough to take over. I’ve got a taste for them now.

Appleton and Son, Market Place, Ripon, North Yorkshire; tel: 01765-603198.

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