Scraps en Croûte

But then what if you lived in a city or a town? For that stripe of pre-industrial European pie lover, there were pie specialists — professionals to whom you could take your edible miscellany, and who for a fee would put it into a pre-made crust and bake it up for you. In France such shops were known as pâtisseries, after the Old French word pâte which simply meant “dough” or “paste”. Nowadays we think of a “pâte” as fancy a French meat loaf. Yet once upon a time the word could refer to just about anything baked in a crust. And as for a modern pâtisseries, well, they don’t do much in the way of pies anymore.