Oh, for a good old pork pie... with that scrummy aspic.

Sadly, the good old English style pork pie is as rare as rocking horse manure here in Oz, and when you actually find one it's as expensive as hell.

There is a pie shop not too far from me, and the regular Aussie style meat pies are around $5.00 - $6.00... their English style pork pies [made in Oz but to old English recipe] $9.50.  They don't sell too many... and no wonder.  I mean, who in their right mind would pay that for a bit of [less than prime-cut] pork wrapped in pastry?  Even their regular pies are way over priced IMHO... like I can make a half a dozen just as good at home for that price... and I do.  Pork pies at home, though, not quite as easy to get right.

As for spammers.... crush their gonads under ID's hammer.

Haven't had one of those in donkeys years.... like about '69 would have been the last really, really decent one I had... at the Black Horse Inn with a pint or 3 of Whitbread Tankard... or Trophy, cos it were threepence cheaper.  Yeah, I know, I was only 16!  But I was a big lad for my age.... and I could down 8 - 10 pints [scrumpy included] before I started getting legless... so they thought I was a seasoned drinker and older.

As for the commercial, mass produced ones, yeah, we get those here.  A few places import them, but they're small and quite expensive... gone in a couple of man-sized bites and nowhere near value for money... hence they stay on the supermarket shelf.   The locally produced ones, nah, they're just not the same, like there's something missing while something non-traditional has been added, and I'm not overly fussed on them

There was a place a few years back where we could get a very close to an authentic pork pie, and that was the Britannia Inn, which popped up in Brisbane after the World Expo in '88, but alas, that is now gone, along with its traditional English cooking and imported English beers.  Ah, the memories... you can get the lad out of England, but you can't get England out of the lad.  I still make and enjoy the traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pud.

Bit of wishful thinking there.