Masterchef: The Fanzines

Food is a very important part of going to the match, the timing of the game critical to choices such as eat/drink before /on the way to/ at the ground or all three. Food was therefore at the front of many fanzine contributors’ minds so this week let’s delve into how fanzines covered food, food options, everything food. This article could easily have ended up being called Pies in fanzines but for the extensive research we have undertaken to widen the net. You’ll thank me later.

The Name Game

Puns, food, your favourite team, was there a better recipe from which to name your fanzine? Well, the Hearts supporters who started The Jam Piece certainly thought not. Jam Piece is a bad/inspired play on Hearts informal nickname “Jam Tarts” and piece is vernacular for a sandwich. Every Scot of a certain era and class would have been brought up on jam pieces.

The cover of issue 10 of The Jam Piece is also a protest against a rather less successful recipe dreamt up by Wallace Mercer, Hearts at a new stadium at Newton Hall, Millerhill[1], seven miles from Gorgie. The pig, I assume one of three, is building a house to thwart the big bad wolf.

Sort of continuing with this theme, Garibaldi was a short-lived Nottingham Forest Fanzine lasting 4 issues in the 1992-3 season. It certainly had plenty of filling with up to 50 pages per issue (enough food puns – Ed).

I had hoped this fanzine was named after someone’s garbled attempt to make a pun out of the name of twice European Cup winning striker Gary Birtles and their favourite biscuit, but the real reason is slightly more prosaic.

“Garibaldi” in this context refers to the “Garibaldi Red” colour of Forest’s home kit. Forest adopted this colour in 1865[2] to honour Italian freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi who was world famous at the time and had visited England in 1864 (apparently in South Shields!) and made a big impression on JS Scrimshaw the chairman of the newly formed club. The team also originally wore Garibaldi red caps with tassels, something I hope they reintroduce sometime soon.

Anyway, the biscuit IS also named after the Italian stallion so it’s staying in, plus the cover to issue one contained a couple more classic food memes (what were memes called in 1992?)

Rotherham’s Windy & Dusty produced this classic cover for their last ever issue in 1993 celebrating a former star, the man that launched a million inflatables, Imre Varadi. (see also https://footballfanzineculture.blog/2026/03/16/fotd-keep-off-the-fence-matlock-town/ ) That they decided to commemorate this with a terrible food pun celebrating a 5 game unbeaten run is PEAK fanzine. Well done everyone.

Finally, there is soup, Kidderminster Harriers’ fanzine The Soup to be precise. It’s not that often that I’ve seen soup on offer at grounds and it is certainly not something I would choose, I settled on Bovril as the molten hot liquid of choice to harm myself with at football many moons ago. However, this is not a view fans of or past visitors to Kidderminster Harriers’ Aggborough ground will share.

For years the sadly now departed Murdoch soups and pies were legendary at Aggborough and obviously gave the fanzine its name. Brian Murdoch and his family business supplied the food at the ground for nearly 60 years with his pies regularly topping charts as the most expensive (£4.50 at one point) which seems unfair when it was a 800g cottage pie and also widely recognised as one of the best.[3] No one seems to know the recipe of the soup but it reached mythical status as well as giving the fanzine its name.

As a bonus the cover of this issue of The Soup also has a special Christmas foodstuff.

The Devil Inside

Let’s move inside the ground and fanzines now. I should probably have saved Issue 6 of Grimsby’s superb Sing When We’re Fishing as the main course but anyway, this 1989 review of the snack bar of Blundell Park’s Findus stand, I cod you not (STOP IT – Ed). It is all you could wish for and much much more.

There is a long list of mishaps and issues to grouch about but our correspondent assures us that Egon Ronay would be delighted with the snack bar, before describing the sort of fare we’ve all faced more than once. The Gareth Hunt reference is one for the teenagers.

PIES!

I know this article appeared in a previous blog but this piece on pies around Scotland written by a Yorkshireman in Cowdenbeath’s The Blue Brazils Unofficial fanzine issue 1 from Cowdenbeath in 1991 is well worth looking at again due to the parsimony over Arbroath and the volume of Bovril and the ranking for Clyde and Queen of The South being made despite the fact that our correspondent wasn’t even there…Anyway, for the purposes of this blog it didn’t properly explain to non-Scottish readers what a bridie is.

Bridies are said to have been ‘invented’ by a Forfar baker in the 1850s. Apparently the name might refer to the frequent appearance of the bridie on wedding menus in Angus, or to Margaret Bridie of Glamis, who sold them at the Butter market in Forfar. If you want to read more apparently there was a book published in 1981 by Rosalie Gow called “Modern Ways with Traditional Scottish Recipes” Form a queue at your local library in the morning.

Actually, this is a serious business and was subject to some controversy a few years ago with the application for a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) by two Forfar bakers. For the uninitiated and PDO laws, a bridie is a type of pasty, a horseshoe or D-shaped shortcrust traditionally filled with minced beef, suet, and onions and in my experience are delicious. As of 2021 they withdrew the protected status application as apparently everybody in Angus has their own recipe for making it.

According to a .Gov document I read (the things I do for you!) “A ‘Forfar Bridie’ should contain quality assured beef which has whole supply chain assurance and provides reassurance to consumers of provenance, highest standards of production as well as animal welfare and wellbeing.”[4]. The reason I include this is that it hardly fits the description of most of the pies I’ve been served at games.

And so, we come to issue 3 of Hull, Hell and Happiness, a fanzine dedicated to..well if you can’t work that out I can’t help you. Issue 3 appeared in 1989 and page 64 (64!, calm down lads) had these rather superb descriptions of the haute cuisine on offer in their “Pump Power Pie Chart” review that doesn’t contain a chart.

The article does contain descriptions of buying, consuming, being disappointed by and suffering the effects of various pies served by yet another “Morrissey student lookalike”. We’ve all been there.

Protest

Using foodstuff as a form of protest was also something fanzines managed, part of the great creativity of the genre. Robert Chase was the “much loved” chairman of Norwich for 11 years from 1985. Though the club had some success under his tenure fans had become totally disillusioned with his habit of selling attacking players and not replacing them adequately. Players like Robert Fleck, Ruel Fox, Chris Sutton, Efan Ekoku and Mark Robins were sold for combined fees of over £11m with no suitable replacements in sight.

By the time this article appeared in the Ferry ‘cross the Wensum fanzine in 1995 Norwich were well on their way to relegation from the premiership having faltered and only just missing out on the title in 1993 and so we get The Robert chase Lard Page and 10 alternative uses of lard in suggestions that veer below the belt and might easily have resulted in a solicitor’s letter.

Below the Chase Lard guide there is another foodstuff in a fanzine name, a cheeky one at that in Crabs on the Ball. A few searches for Cromer Town and crabs merely gives you people asking when crab season is. The difficulty of running small clubs is writ large in this story, but few would have a stranger tale than Cromer.

This appears on their wiki page. How many teams played somewhere with such an evocative and food related as Beef Meadows? To then move to a place that they might lose because of the death of the King of Norway 89 years later smacks of stupendously bad luck, perhaps they were cursed by a wronged cow? It’s not clear what happened about this but by 2022 the club folded, apparently with no one left willing to run it. The google guides to the club from a few years ago are perhaps the ultimate Vox Pop, nepo positive, negative and incomprehensible.

More importantly though, I have found no other trace of the fanzine and though it is now on the list due to this confirmed sighting, I suspect it will be one of a few that I never find a print copy of. If anyone does know anything, please let me know. If you have a print copy, cherish it and the British Library would like to speak to you (after you’ve sent me a pdf).

The Final Whiskle

Fanzines tried to whip up protest with searing exposes, roasting pies and pie stalls and reducing haughty chairmen with simmering resentment.

Food is an integral part of the game but most clubs never seem to get it right, except for Kidderminster perhaps, we’ve moved from cheap slop to expensive, well-presented slop with everything in between.

I’ll leave you with this recipe from Sing When We’re Fishing issue 2, the superlative Grimsby fanzine who published this magnificent recipe for Fourth Division strugglers pie one that is still used widely used by clubs today and with a few small tweaks could apply to most perennial underachievers.