5: Greggses

Continuing our descent into UK high street chain food retail, today's delicacy comes to us from the warm oozing centre of Greggs bakery. What to say about Greggs. A UK institution. One that I have a lot of sympathetic affection for, it's extremely widespread, extremely cheap, fairly cheerful vendor of largely beige, only slightly warm, baked goods. There's one, sometimes two, if not on every single high street, then on a very large set of them.

This pie came tucked into a box of six. They show signs of probably not leaving the oven at quite the right time, they're rather dark and the filling has escaped several units and reduced to a sticky black winter-spiced tar. Vegan too! Or at least, vegan-friendly, I assume that means the pies are vegan, but as we've already established, I'm not too rigorous on that front, and it's Christmas. They're labelled as 'Sweet mince pies' too, which is a little bit unsettling, is that supposed to act as a welcoming promise or a cautionary warning? Only one way to find out!

There's a dusting of powdered sugar, which as ever, mostly goes everywhere except the food input mechanism. It's quite tricky to get the bugger out of the tray, the profile is very shallow again, and the leaky filling has done a pretty good job of gluing it in place. But I manage.

Tart! There's a big dose of citric acid here, which absolutely frames the chewy inside. The pastry has got a suprisingly workable crust going on, Greggs has been dabbling increasingly with a Vegan range the past year or so, occasionally generating some weird political noises from the anti-woke punditry sector, and I've tried most of them and the one unifying note I generally have there is that there's something uncanny and disappointing about the pastry (and the fillings are basically just salt-flavoured ooze, but still).

Here we kind of have a lemon tart with a raisin-ish subtext, in a nice sized pie, with decent pastry, cost me very little save in dignity, and left me feeling zero guilt about dairy or suet. Absolute banger. Definitely would eat again, jingling all the way.