Never underestimate the power of pie

Today I share with you the story of the tielle Sétois, the famous octopus pie of Sète, a town across the water from Marseillan. And I make a vegetarian version. Don’t tell anyone.

I wanted to tell you a story about Sète, the lively, confident, scruffy-around-the-edges mini-Marseille across the lagoon from us.

At the end of the Nineteenth Century, Italian fishermen from Gaeta, north of Naples, arrived in Sète with their families, their boats and a recipe for Octopus pie, tielle Sétoise, which they in turn had learned from the Spanish. They are made from a sturdy, yeasted dough which made it robust enough to last for a couple of days at sea. In this respect, they remind me a little of Cornish pasties, where the pastry is as much packaging as nourishment. They were poor people’s food, and the Italians managed to keep them to themselves. The Italian children were embarrassed to take their tielles with them to school, wishing they could eat the same foods as their French classmates.

In the 1930s, a French woman from nearby Agde, Adrienne Pages, married into the Italian community and set up a shellfish stall called La Reine des Mers, the queen of the seas, selling these special pies. Today, you find tielles in shops and on market stalls all over the region, and there are fiercely fought competitions each year as to who makes the best one.

Adrienne Pages, centre, who did so much to popularise the tielle. Picture courtesy of www.tourisme-sete.com

Today, shops and other businesses in Sète still bear Italian names, and the octopus, once the food of the poor, has come to symbolise the town. The main square, Place Léon Blum, is dominated by the town hall and also by a large fountain created by the sculptor Pierre Nocca, in the shape of an enormous octopus. The locals call the square the Place du Pouffre, this being the Sétois word for poulpe, or octopus.

While the traditional octopus pie remains the most popular, today you find variations on a theme at some bakeries. I recently visited the Tielles Giullietta stall in Sète’s excellent halles and bought one of their aubergine tielles which inspired me to create the recipe I am sharing with you today.

I use a rich tomato sauce which I simmer for a long time, similar to the one you might cook octopus in. In the original version, the distinctive rusty colour of the pastry comes from the sauce seeping out into the dough, but here I help it along a bit by adding some tomato purée to the dough too, along with some piment d’espelette. This mild, sweet red chilli pepper has been grown around the French Basque town of Espelette since the Sixteenth Century is used in many dishes in this part of France, sometimes interchangeably with black pepper. In the United Kingdom, you can find it in some delis or mail order from souschef.co.uk. Alternatively, you can just use some mild chilli flakes, sweet paprika or leave it out altogether.

Tielles were traditionally cooked in a terracotta dish called a teglia, from which their name is derived, but I just use an ordinary tart tin and so does almost everyone else. It is robust and substantial, and makes a great lunch with a salad. It is also very good picnic food, if picnics are your sort of thing.

You can find my version of the octopus Tielle Sétoise in my book, Notes from a Small Kitchen Island.

Aubergine pie, in the manner of a tielle

Don’t be put off by making the yeasted dough – it is very easy – but if you really can’t face it, this pie (or tart, to be strictly correct) is also good made with shortcrust.

The different elements to the recipe mean that it takes a little while to pull it all together, but none of the stages are difficult or complicated. It is fun to do if you’re planning a morning pottering about in the kitchen.