Festive Review # 12: Aldi Specially Selected All Butter Mince Pies

The magical Christmas season is a time for many things. It is a time to put aside differences and allow space in your heart for love to prevail. It is a time to embrace one another, not only as fellow humans, but as siblings. (In some parts of Lancashire, they are very keen to embrace their actual siblings, often naked.) Christmas is also a time to gorge on a relentless slurry of sweet and savoury foodstuffs until you wake up one frosty dawn spooning a stranger’s garden gnome in a pool of your own regurgitated advocaat. Most of all, though, Christmas is a time for balance.

The arrival of the shortest day heralds a shift in the balance between darkness and light. Gluttonous revellers who permit themselves just one more pig-in-blanket obsess over the balance of the bathroom scales. Even the least discerning and self-aware members of society (Coldplay fans and James Corden, for example) reflect on the past twelve months and balance its successes and failures against their hopes and fears for the coming year.

For some, however, finding balance is difficult. Take bulbous-bonced Geordie jungle dweller Ant McPartlin, for example. A misjudged step onto a kangaroo’s disembodied testicle would render him and his monolithic cranium defenceless against gravity’s whims. A similar fate could befall his foghorn-voiced bushtucker buddy Kelly Brook, or any number of top-heavy womenfolk, for that matter.

Despite my desperate efforts, I am powerless to rid my mind of such imagery when I look upon this Aldi Specially Selected All Butter Mince Pie. Similarly expansive in the upstairs department, at first sight it is rather alarming to behold. I find myself staring in the same shameful manner that Victorian Londoners gawked at the unfortunate ‘Elephant Man’ John Merrick. It is as though the pie machine at Aldi has malfunctioned and piled a couple of extra lids on.

Nor is this beefy morsel left wanting for height in the midsection. The effect is akin to an old-fashioned bobby in high heels wearing a palace guard’s bearskin atop his own massive helmet, and if that doesn’t get your mouth watering, I don’t know what will. It’s a solid lump, the prop forward of the festive food formation. So, without further ado, let’s get down and engage in a succulent seasonal scrum…

Like Professor Brian Cox, the pastry is not as thick as it looks, which is fortunate since the mincemeat within does not reach the ceiling of its cavernous, crusty chamber. As with a turkey you might absent-mindedly leave too long in the oven after glugging buck’s fizz solidly since 8am, the filling-to-pastry ratio leans a little toward the dry side of the spectrum. However, the glutinous innards are almost effervescent, the citrus fruits fizzing and crackling on my tongue amid the cognac, ruby port and cider. It’s a confident, forthright morsel with no gimmickry to hide behind. If I possessed some persuasive powers of pastry seduction and could somehow sweettalk this big-headed bite into a state of heightened moisture, we would have a very strong contender for pie of the year. Alas, like McPartlin after his misstep on that marsupial’s discarded gland, it just falls down.

Serving suggestion: Take this no-nonsense pie down the pub for a gallon of manly ale while you engage in manly conversation about such manly things as motorbikes, damp-proof coursing and Fred Dibnah, then, once you and the pie are suitably lubricated, devour it in no more than three manly mouthfuls and punctuate your final swallow with a manly burp.