Pie Irons

It's in the street a couple of blocks from here?  Do you think it dates to a time before homes here had reticulated water?

It is like the sinks at camping grounds (I saw one of those kitchens  when we were camping on Pelion Peninsular last autumn), but there is certainly no camping around here.

F tells me that when she was in Cyprus years ago there was still a communal oven in the village where people brought bread and casserole dishes to be cooked all together.  She and Panagiota were discussing such things and Panagiota pointed out that the closed down bakery in the street behind us used to fire up its ovens for community cooking on Sundays.  All the 'cooks' would take their Sunday food there on the way to church and pick it up on the way home.

It put F in mind of her rural school in 1960's NZ.  There are no 'school meals' in NZ, but her school resolved the desire for kids to have something hot to eat in the middle of the day in winter time by having a big pie warmer.  Kids would bring a foil wrapped carefully labeled 'pie' from home that would be heated up during the morning and then handed out by monitors when the bell went to signal lunch break.

This IS going somewhere (I promise) - you know those electric pie-makers / sandwich toasters that  some people have sitting on their benches (largely unused) that cook your pie contents between two slices of bread sealed together at the edges? Well the pre-electric version was two cast metal shapes (nearly heavy enough to kill a cat) hinged together on one side with long handles coming out the other side, and F and her siblings had to 'cook' their pies in the open fire in the lounge the night before they would be reheated at school.  The contents were usually whatever had been leftover from dinner that evening.  The pies so made had a habit of going soggy before the end of the reheating process, so that consuming them was an exercise in not burning yourself with hot pie filling dripping from the soggy toast crust.  

Stick croutons in hot soup and you get the picture.

The long-handled heavy pie iron is NOT one of the bits of old kit occupying a corner of our kitchen cupboard.  Besides who has an open fire to use them in these days?  

Does anyone else remember these pie irons?

We borrowed this picture - if anyone wants to buy one you can easily find them on the internet.

NB: F seems to recall theirs were donated to the local scouts in the clean-out associated with a house move - good for cooking over a camp fire.  Some people had round ones which did away with the hard, filling-less corners, but wasted bread!