Stargazy pie during a very stormy winter. According to the modern festival, which is combined with the Mousehole village illuminations, the entire catch was baked into a huge stargazy pie, encompassing seven types of fish and saving the village from starvation. The story of Bawcock was popularised by Antonia Barber's children's book "The Mousehole Cat", which featured the stargazy pie. In 2007 contestant Mark Hix won the BBC's "Great British Menu" with a variant of the dish. Stargazy pie is a pastry-based fish pie which, by tradition, is filled with whole pilchards. Critically, the pilchards must retain their heads, which then poke
Pie and mash eels were one of the few forms of fish that could survive in the heavily polluted River Thames and London's other rivers at that time. Supply was plentiful through the late 1800s, particularly from the Dutch fishing boats landing catches at Billingsgate Fish Market. Since 2010, as revealed in a joint study by the Zoological Society of London and the Environment Agency, the number of eels captured in research traps in the River Thames fell from 1,500 in 2005 to 50 in 2010, meaning most eels used in pie and mash shops are now from the Netherlands and Northern Ireland.