During the three-week long Brighton Festival in May, concerts are sometimes held in the opulent Music Room ( .uk).. It’s the annual festival of Lord Clive’s mince pies. To the lilt of troubadours’ Languedocien airs, the Mince Pie Brotherhood’s procession – La Tr?Noble et Tr?Gourmande Confr?e du Petit P? de P?nas – winds majestically through the medieval lanes The participants are robed in blue gowns. Dangling proudly from their necks are replicas of Albion’s festive comestible, Britain’s most enduring gift to France
It’s the annual festival of Lord Clive’s mince pies. Although only mid-morning, the bonhomie is flowing as profusely as the wine in P?nas. This small town, just inland from Cap d’Agde on the southern coast of France, is a maze of ancient alleys and cobbled squares with fountains. What P?nas is famous for – in P?nas, at least – is having guarded the secret of Old England’s authentic mince pies for 233 years.The original version with mincemeat made from real meat never recovered popularity after Cromwell banned it, and has long been extinct in its native land.
Yet the mince pie not only flourished in this far corner of a foreign field, but became the town’s trademark. Lord Robert Clive, Market Drayton schoolboy hoodlum dunce, later Clive of India, father of the Raj, was responsible. He convalesced in P?nas in 1768, 12 years after avenging the Black Hole and six years before his suicide aged 49. Ruthless, ambitious, cunning and avaricious (the ideal 18th-century British national hero), the once penniless clerk arrived in P?nas flush with Indian loot, one of the world’s wealthiest men.The town’s library is the former Three Pigeons Inn where Lord and Lady Clive rested after three months travelling from England. A plaque outside it records the Baron presenting his pies to P?nas in gratitude for a happy sojourn. Not only is this scene hard to imagine – the ennobled town bully with floury hands – but it is, alas, of doubtful authority.Baker Daniel Lallemand swears his family’s recipe (minced mutton, sugar, lemon zest), came directly from Clive, although exactly how is lost in mists of flour dust.
Local English-born historian Jane Lloret, a Confr?e member, believes the clues lie in Lady Clive’s letters home. The Clives rented the Ch?au Saint Martin de Grave, set like a palace in an ocean of vines. P?nas’s wonderful climate had fostered a colony of ailing nobility. Forced to entertain themselves, they formed something called the Picnic Club, to which members contributed favourite dishes The Clives loathed French cooking, “nasty, garlicky stuff”.
