Visited with Clough, Sammington-doublepenetration-whammybamthankyoumanIhopeyouresatisfied and my good friend Mark.
HISTORY: Pyestock was conceptualised in pre Elizabethan times after the great world wide pork pie famine. The idea was to create and stock pile pork pies in the event of other such catastrophes happening again. Over the years the institution decided to stick with the old English spelling of 'pye' as opposed to the modern equivalent 'pie', hence the name 'Pyestock'.
PROCESS:After the swine is delivered to site, it is blown through a series of pipes at speeds not dissimilar to the speed of light in order to tenderise the meat.
Next, the swine is de-skinned by being strapped down on this ledge...
....then air is pumped through the vast pig de-skinning tube in order to blow the skin off its body.
Here you can see some of the air inlet pipes
Here you can see a 'fluffer' at work in the tube. This person had to remove all this skin and fluff from the enclosure at the end of a day.
The term 'fluffer' was later adopted by workers on the London Underground who did a similar job removing debris from the subterranean train tunnels.
Once the staff were happy that the meat was tender and fully de-skinned, the pigs had to be cooked. Each pig was cooked separately in its own rotisserie oven. There were banks of these ovens so a number of pigs could be cooked at one. The individual rotisserie ovens can be seen here both during the day and the night
One of the many revometers which recorded each pigs RPM while in the oven...
Signage proving the harsh working conditions that were endured in the cooking area
Quality control was paramount, and any pigs that were over cooked were loaded into these vertical canons, and discarded in space...
Other jobs on site included the extraction of pork jelly from the pork jelly mine near the centre of the earth. A huge borehole was created, and workers ventured down each day to collect the gelatinous goods.
Due to high pressures from the centre of the earth, the borehole required substantial gates in order to stop the workers being catapulted out into space along with the over cooked pigs
Again, quality control was paramount, and the mined jelly passed through a number of filters before being injected into the pie (or 'pye')
Incase of another world wide pork pie famine, the institution had it's own friendly pilot who would drop pie parcels from high altitude to the worst affected areas
Pies were moved around locally by bus, but in order to protect the driver from grand theft pie, we had to conceal his identity
A handful of pics from various other parts of the site
Due to a horrific accident with a wasp soon after the first world war, the whole site had to be shut down, and has ceased making and stockpiling pork pies ever since. This is a great site with such a rich and interesting history that need not be forgotten next time we have a shortage of pies.
Thanks for looking