Why Simon Day hopes baking a bacon and egg pie will guide the Black Caps to glory tonight. 

For a sport dominated by statistics, logic and precision, cricket is strangely superstitious. Every Tweet has a consequence, every movement away from the television affects the game thousands of kilometres away. Certain scores have magical properties. Nelson refers to an individual or team score of 111, or its multiples, and it is believed to bring bad luck. The late, great umpire David Shepherd would stand on one leg when any score sat on 111, in an attempt to offset the curse. 

At the 2015 World Cup I took a bacon and egg pie to every Black Caps game I attended. Except one – the final at the MCG. At the first game against Sri Lanka in Christchurch my mother-in-law had baked for our small family group. I fed big crews at the quarter-final in Wellington, and the semi-final in Auckland. However, after travelling to Melbourne I was distracted with the excitement of the Black Caps finally making an appearance in the final, and I forgot to bake a pie. Five balls into the game the B&E pie had cursed the New Zealand team as Mitchell Starc bowled Brendon McCullum. 

The reason I bake pies for the cricket is a celebration of the joy of watching this unique sport. Cricket is about spending an entire day at the oval, an eight-hour investment. People who complain about cricket being boring don’t understand how to appreciate the joy of its slow pace. Take a book, a transistor radio, a cushion and a picnic basket full of pies and cheese. This isn’t two hours at the rugby where you grab a punnet of greasy chips at half-time to hold you over. 

Lord’s, the beautiful ground in northwest London, the site of the 2019 Cricket World Cup final between England and New Zealand, is the home of cricket and the heart of this culture of embracing a lavish day out. At Lord’s, they appreciate eating and drinking so much you’re permitted to bring six of your own beers or a bottle of wine. At the outer oval, they sell jugs of Pimm’s. 

It’s the spiritual home of the bacon and egg cricket pie. The stripped MCC colours are described as “egg and bacon”, and the members are perhaps the best in the world at indulging at the cricket.     

This is the recipe I’ll be using on Sunday night as I attempt to reverse the curse of the pie. They’re the perfect meal for an all-night cricket game. Fresh out the oven the make a great late-night snack full of protein for the big night ahead. And they’re just as good served eight hours later for breakfast. 

Forget your PJs, bake a B&E pie in solidarity with the Black Caps. Reverse the curse.

WORLD CUP BACON & EGG PIE

• puff pastry
• 250g Freedom Farms streaky or shoulder bacon
• ½ an onion, diced
• 10 large Freedom Farms eggs
• 1 egg yolk beaten with a tablespoon of cold water (put the separated white into your pie so there’s no waste)
• salt and pepper to season
• NO PEAS OR CARROTS ALLOWED

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Line a pie dish with baking paper, then line the bottom and sides with pastry, trimming off the excess.

Cook the bacon in a frying pan for two minutes then add the onion and cook for a further five minutes, or until the onions and bacon are golden brown and starting to caramelise. Then let it cool slightly.

Break the eggs into the pie; drag a knife through about half of the yolks so they ooze into the whites

Season with salt and pepper.

Place the bacon and onion into the pie’s egg mix.

Make a lid with the remaining pastry, crimp the edges to seal, and stab holes in the lid. (At this point I like to use the excess pastry to make a bat and ball design on the lid.)

Brush the top of the pie using a pastry brush and the beaten egg yolk.

Bake at 200°C for 35-40 minutes or until the pastry is golden.

Serve warm or at room temperature with Wattie’s tomato sauce. 

This content was created in paid partnership with Freedom Farms. Learn more about our partnerships here.

We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today, Alex Casey finds the Disneyland of Laughter.

I’ve long felt a spiritual pull towards The Bugger Cafe, although I’ve never really known exactly where it was. All I knew was the deep envy I felt seeing friends, colleagues and strangers on Instagram, beaming with joy as they sipped java in front of the most humorous décor since those barstools that have bum cheeks moulded onto the outside. Inside, it’s all bugger everything. Bugger this, bugger that, bugger you and, of course, bugger me. 

So you could imagine my excitement when, speeding down state highway 25 after a raucous women’s weekend in Whitianga (Love Island on the laptop and Alison Holst’s sausage rolls in the oven), a sign informed me that the Bugger Cafe was coming up on the left. I shrieked at my friend Zoe over the thunderous ABBA tuneage to pull the fuck over. We’d just had lunch in Tairua, sure, but it was time to get absolutely well and truly buggered (not like that).

Before I’d even stepped through the front door, I was chortling to the heavens. There was a tractor made to look as if it had driven into a ditch (bugger), a toilet for Bugger Cafe customers ONLY (bugger) and a huge sign featuring the glorious tagline “laugh a little” (bugger me – that’s good). As someone who steadfastly believes that one solid laugh a day is far more valuable than so-called “money” or “savings”, I was about to cash in big time at the Bank of Bugger. 

Strolling through the three large spaces that maketh the Bugger Cafe, it was hard to take in all the humour. Cartoons depicting what the internet would refer to as “fails”, collages of bugger-based phrases to weave into everyday life, and an interesting water feature that made it seem as if a tap was floating in mid-air. Not quite “bugger” but definitely “wow”. I stared in awe at the coffee machine, boasting a proud BUGGER personalised plate. 

Even the napkins and the takeaway coffee cups were bugger-ified. I normally wouldn’t endorse taking one of each as a souvenir via the environment but, in a way, climate change is the biggest bugger-up of all. Merch wise, a stack of rolled-up Bugger tea towels ($15.50) sat above the counter, and I was happy to hear another punter inquire as to whether or not the “Keep Calm and Bugger Off” t-shirts were available (not currently). 

I bought a black cherry-flavoured kombucha (I’m trying to have a glow-up, don’t look at me) and Zoe ordered an iced chocolate. We sat outside in the sunshine and watched a beaming elderly couple jump on their pushbikes and glide down the highway to their nearby country oasis. What a life! Kombucha be gone, what I really need for my wellbeing is to up sticks to Pipiroa and devote my life to soaking up rays outside the Bugger Cafe. 

As anyone who orders iced chocolates will know, it’s always a crapshoot as to whether or not you’ll receive an understated glass of chilled-out choco, or a completely humiliating freak shake extravaganza featuring a stack of donuts, your first childhood friend, and a Reader’s Digest jammed on top of it. Zoe, unfortunately, got the latter, all slathered in chocolate sauce and piled up with cream. It turned heads. It was the talk of the town. She didn’t like it very much – “too icy”.

My kombucha was fine, but sadly we didn’t have room for anything else. I took to Tripadvisor when I got home to see how other diners had fared. “The walls are funny to read and there is a video playing in a loop of Bugger moments, but our bugger moment was stopping there for lunch!” said one critic who had a hard time with some uncooked eggs. “If you cannot get a laugh here, you don’t have a sense of humour,” said John, “and the toilets were excellent.” 

Before we got back in the car to return to the drab, humourless north, I approached the unsmiling man behind the counter once more to buy a souvenir tea towel. At $15.50, it seemed a reasonable price to pay for so many different, never-seen-before fonts. I swiped my card excitedly, chuffed to have found the perfect souvenir from the perfect place. The machine thought about it for a moment. 

Declined. 

Good or bad? Crazy that you think laughter could ever be bad.

Verdict: Order wisely and chuckle stupidly.