Blood, Flour And Pity Pie
Every now and again life will bring you up smartly, rap you repeatedly on the forehead with a sharpened HB, before rolling you in pastry, baking you at 350 degrees for 45 minutes and entering you into a bake-off which you will lose, thus leading to your being flung (by Life) in a field for the cows to tread on, like the useless loser pie you are. I’ve seen it happen too often in these competitive times.
The life of the occasional housewife is often a lonely one. If you are a milkman, or a postman or a wandering door-to-door gigolo and the door to an unassuming, ordinary house opens to reveal a woman with flour on her hands and pain in her eyes you might pause and wonder about why she is in full Belle Epoque French costume. Then you may wonder why she is on the floor, beating her fists to bloody, floury, dredged-steak-like stumps and breaking open her very heart unto your immaculately polished shoes (I’m assuming you are only the very best sort of milkman or postman or door-to-door gigolo.)
You would be right in assuming that here was a woman disappointed in her pastry. Do not, therefore, go gently into that good fore-noon but be a gent – no be a man – no be a human, and prevent her from her senseless self-harming. Kneel down and comfort her and look into her red-rimmed eyes with the compassion of a thousand Amnesty International typists. Then, taking her mangled hands into your’s, tell her that these are the hands of a true artisan, a baker at one with her pastry; hands that can knead her dough like Tony Hart kneaded incredible little plasticene people like Morph in the cult 70’s BBC children’s art programme, Take Hart. Assure her that even small changes in relative humidity can affect one’s pastry deleteriously and that melt-in-the-mouth is a tired pastry cliche anyway.
If she brightens at this human kindness in a cold world on a temperate doorstep, and mumbles something about being trod on by cows, tell her that she is about as far from being one of life’s loser pies-in-a-field as Gordon Brown is from being a prima ballerina. Don’t be afraid to really extend the pie metaphor – until near painful breaking point if need be, for it’s what she needs to hear right then. After all her life is bound up in the pie, consumed by it, and it is the source of all her woe.
Next, wipe the snot and blood and flour from her face with a clean linen kerchief and tell her she must own her pie! She must master her despair and seize the pie! Say “Carpe piem!” – she’s sure to know Latin. Impress upon her that instead of the pie consuming her she must consume the pie because if she doesn’t, wherefore the effing pie in the effing first place? This use of effing on her doorstep from a complete stranger will shock her more than any 50sish slap across her cheeks and will suddenly pique her interest in this kind but forceful caller to her home.
If you do all that and you happen to have lovely strong forearms and an ability to discourse on the subject “Offshore Windfarms: Blot On The Landscape or Clean Green Mighty Machines?” with particular reference to the Danish, you might, you might just get lucky that day. Don’t, however, assume the pie is in the oven right away though or you may wind up lost forever in a cave far under the ground, tied up with electrical cord and sitting amongst skeletons wearing the hats and pizza-delivery caps of other too-presumptuous tradesmen. Remember that kneading dough leads to powerful upper body strength in even the frailest looking Belle Epoquer. More powerful than say, a postman or a milkman or a door-to-door gigolo.
November 7th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Pie – isn’t that where you use 3.14159oz of every ingredient and mix them with knitting kneadles?
November 7th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Fancy you should post this. In previous years when I represented lonely divorcees, I always kept a roll of aluminum foil handy, in order to protect their delicate crusts from being burned in the oven of domesticity.
Cheers.
November 7th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Oh, and use Crisco shortening. My mother says, that’s the best for pie crusts.
Cheers.
November 7th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Somehow I picture a slightly different scene: some pissed-off looking harridan with cold hands and a sore back ripping at the cardboard packaging of half a dozen chicken pot pies, a fag dangling from one side of her mouth as she pries the frozen pastries out of their hermetically sealed boxes. She’s in a rush, on her way to her first job (cleaning the bingo hall), getting the family’s meal ready five hours early. She trips over the kids’ shoes on her way to answer the doorbell, wrenching her ankle and cursing viciously. Third time this week she’s twisted her ankle, hence the tears.
The postman/gigolo will still need to use tender consideration, though perhaps of a different kind. (No need to know anything about offshore windfarms or how Danes view them, for instance.) But the part about the lovely strong forearms — that’s just the same.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I have given up pies – but sadly you and MTL are Scottish and will love the pie till the day you die – no rhyme intended. Even now I find, secreted over the house in lonely cupboards, plastic boxes filled with Mr kipling’s apple variety. I know he dreams of those monstrous meat ones his mother used to get in Edinburgh but knows they are never to cross this threshold.
Pastry is all a question of temperature of the hands and it is one of life’s tragedies that mine are ice cold yet I will not make pastry. I will not!
November 7th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Pie making as is life is the continual challenge and desire to forgive ones intemperance and to hold on to that elusive ?Hope? as one never knows what one will find around the next corner?perhaps a high end dough making machine?better yet- a French pastry chief named Pierre who doubles as a masseuse. (26, internationally acclaimed rock climber, artist, model, etc, etc) Imagine what he can do with his hands?
In the mean time however, if he doesn?t show up right away take the sage advice of my Grandmie who won a blue ribbon when she was 10 at the New York State Fair for her apple pie- ?it?s all in the feel??
(To this day I have no freaken idea what she meant! Though she was a naturalist and into alternative energy and as a girl lived on a organic farm and milked cows)
November 7th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Oi loike moiy poiy
(must be said in a Cornish accent)
November 7th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
You can buy pastry these days you know. Comes in a handy cardboard thingie from the freezer section in any old supermarket. Thaw it out, roll it out,dust with flour, pop it into a tin and Bob’s your uncle, my uncle is Pete, but you know what I mean.
November 7th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Conan, getting that last 0.00159 bit of egg measured quite right is the very devil of pastry making. Put in 0.00158 and your pie will be as dry as the crust’n'mascara lump around Ozzy Osbournes’ eyes in the morning. Add 0.0016 and you might as well stab yourself in the eye with a fork and stumble out into heavy traffic.
Randall, and Crisco is now available 100% trans fat free! My granny taught me with butter though – less reliable but scrummier if it’s done right, I reckon. Some people use no shortening whatsoever but egg yolks instead. It all comes down to what was in the pie-crusts of your youth though for that will always taste the best.
Mary, I’m glad you kept the forearms – for it would be a very poor sort of doorstep romance without them, all sinewey and hairy and capable and oooh… The postman/milkman/door-to-door gigolo might have to use a very different skill set with that troubled lady. A more direct approach perhaps.
Pat, my granny’s mince pie was food as comforting (with potatoes of course) on a rainy lunchtime as the warm feather foot fold egg-cosies* of a penguin if you were a penguin’s egg. Over here pies are almost exclusively sweet. Apart from frozen pot-pies you don’t see many savoury ones around. It’s a pity. *The scientific term.
Jeremy, well done that Grandmie! The best pie at the new York State fair – blimey. But people say “it’s all in the feel” about so many things: pastry-making, driving, prostate-examination. How do you know you’re not using the wrong feel for the wrong job? A buttery, flakey prostate is no good to man nor male beast, after all.
Kim, a Cornish accent? Well that’s OK. For a minute there I thought you were telling me to go and fornicate with myself in the eastern Borneo mountain dialect. But then I realized that there would have been an e on the poiy if that was the case.
November 7th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Fmc, I missed you there, girl. But have you read the ingredients in these things? There’s more Es in them than in the pumped stomachs of a fair field full of raver folk in early 90s Dorset. Partially hydrogenated hell it is. Having said that, I would give it to party guests in a new York minute, and scoff it myself for that matter, but I’d be loathe to give it to the wee’uns too often.
November 7th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
I’m pretty sure the one we get from Superquinn is fairly E free. I shall check for you and send you the name. Perhaps you can get it over there. It would definitely save on the weeping and postman clutching.
November 8th, 2007 at 5:44 am
the ‘pie’ is a metaphor for pregnancy isn’t it. deep.
November 8th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Fmc, the only e-free frozen stuff we get here is in health food shops and priced as if it were made from saffron, gold and the tears of the angels. If your brand is here I’d snap it up. It’s getting to be that time of year. Pies and party food and what not. I always put out a plate of whatnot – it’s a real crowd-pleaser.
Kara, I’m not. But are you? Your brain may be hinting at something you don’t yet know, you know. Blimey – are you?? God, you know you can’t wear killer shoes when you’re pregnant, don’t you? It’ll be all sensible shoes and support hosiery for you my girl. Go pee on a hamster and see if it turns blue, I’ll wait here…
November 8th, 2007 at 11:22 am
I’ve been sitting here having a quiet laugh over ’saffron, gold and the tears of the angels.’ Sounds like a great recipe. And I’m big on serving whatnot too.
I probably have the coldest hands in Scotland, but I cannot make decent pastry. I refuse to use lard or Crisco (I don’t trust that 100% trans-fat free claim) and I think the butter knows that I love it, but don’t approve of it. I’ve followed all the tricks: ice cold water, a quick, deft handling of the dough, but my pastry is hard and nasty. My mother’s hands were warm and her pastry was superb.
Maybe this year I’ll try it with egg yolks. Hope springs eternal.
November 8th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Ah, the old days of door-to-door gigolo-ing. I could tell you things as would make yer crust curl. Ho ho. I remember this one piece, nice girl she was, BIG girl, yeah? Well, I turns up just as she’s dustin’ ‘er pin with Be-Ro. What a night we had that night. ‘er ‘usband said her turnovers were the best ‘e ever…now wait a minute.
Fatmammycat is right! (surprise surprise) The secret to perfect pastry is Jusrol, short or flakey [sic]. It’s the E numbers that make it so good. Don’t be such a sap. Who are you trying to be Ma Walton? Get your peeny off, let down your hair, it’s MILLER time.
Anyway, E numbers don’t count outside Europe.
November 8th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Hmmm, not really a cook-type person but there is a thing I make that requires the butter to be cold so I freeze a pound of it and then grate it. But that’s probably no help to you whatsoever.
November 8th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Frozen pie crust is truly your friend. You can make it look homemade by stretching it out of shape a bit when you move it from the aluminum pan it came in to your own pie plate.
Or… was all this to just part of your dastardly plan to lure all the top shelf gigolos to your back door/
November 8th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I like cooking and I’m pretty good at it but I absolutely refuse baking. Fuck the pie crusts and all that time-consuming-you must-measure- everything-exactly-crap.
November 8th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
i most certainly am not. and you can tell by the fact the the typed ink of this comment isn’t all smeared with tears.
i was just being deep. maybe too deep.
November 8th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
I love pies… I totally cheated the other day and made one with pastry from he stupormarket and it was WRONG! The fakepastry wasn’t buttery and light and crisp, and it was funny textured and wrong. Hear hear to you of the proper pastry discipline, and I shall forevermore be making it just like you, and having those occasional moments of it just going pearshaped (but not for a pear pie).
Even though sometimes it goes wrongish, the home made pastry will always rule my world and my pies!
November 9th, 2007 at 1:29 am
What Conan Drumm said, hehehehehehehe
November 9th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Wee buns… that’s what you need.
Hi!
November 9th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
“Georgie Porgie, Puddin’ and Pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry”
something bothers me – what about the pudding? no one mentions the pudding. and why the housewives cried? because they’re pregnant?
hm…
November 10th, 2007 at 6:09 am
I so agree dear. Home-made everything at Chez Daphne – jam, Yorkshire puddings, muffins … my Mrs Bridges is a treasure.
November 12th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Mary, see Conan’s tip below.
Docs, well you might know what sort she was by her using Be-Ro to dust her pin. Any decent gel uses Hovis, even if it’s not for visitors.
Conan, that sounds like a great solution. I shall be trying it forthwith.
Jali, it’s a fair cop, missus. You’ve tumbled my little game, got me bang to right, so you ‘ave. I’ll come quietly.
Medbh – I’m the exact opposite. I love baking but can’t be arsed with cooking. If my husband didn’t stop me, and I didn’t have children to grow, I’d probably cook the same thing for tea every day for a month before changing the menu. I just can’t be bothered to think about meals much.
Kara, hmm. Are you sure. You haven’t been fainting at work and getting drawn to hot water and fluffy white towels lately, have you. If you have, then you’ll know for sure, but, word to the wise, you can sometimes get a false positive by being drawn towards fluffy green towels.
Carolyn, believe me, if I could find one that wasn’t stuffed with preservatives and trans-fats, I’d buy it and save myself the fol-de-rol. I can’t though and so fol-de-rol I must.
Manuel, which thing he said? There were 2. The more titter-worthy of them was the first though so I’ll just assume you weren’t gleeing over grated butter. ‘Cos then I’d have to alert the mental health people to raid your gaffe.
birchsprite, the world needs wee buns. Stuff peace! Wee buns is where it’s at!
jenPen, I knew a George once, briefly. A George E. Porjee, as it goes. He disappeared though when the boys came out to play which would be no surprise to you if you knew the Porjee family reputation as runners away from things.
Daphne, I’ve never made jam for fear I’d botulism everyone to death – or whatever it is you can catch from poor bottling technique. Yorkshire puddings….drooble.