Telling porky pies

By: Mrs Robot

I had my first-ever go at making hot water pastry over the weekend. Mr Robot got me a 'Simple Simon' pie mould* for Christmas and I finally got round to testing it out. The mould is cunning because you can rearrange the dividers to make one big pie, six little ones, or all sorts of configurations in between.

I followed the recipe in the Ginger Pig Farmhouse Cookbook. I was a little apprehensive because of the time it said it took, but actually a good chunk of that was boiling two trotters to make the jelly. We had so much jelly left over I've frozen the leftovers – that should speed up any future pie making. The pastry was something else that seemed daunting but was surprisingly easy; I boiled the fats and water together and stirred it into the flour with the handle of a wooden spoon, by which time it was cool enough for my asbestos fingers to work with.

The recipe quantities were enough for three equal-sized pies in the Simple Simon, plus three more slightly smaller ones that I made in fancy metal cake/jelly moulds as that was all I had that looked the right size! The results weren't the prettiest, but I'm pleased with them nonetheless. When I make another batch I'll probably increase the amount of salt in both the pork and the jelly, and perhaps add more herbs or spices to the jelly too. These were nice, but with a little tweaking we could have pie magic.


*This blog is not monetised; the link is purely for information and we do not benefit from it in any way.

Retro recipe: Tonight we're going to party like it's 1959...

By: Mrs Robot

It's no secret that I love vintage - or, as I generally call it, Old Tat. Back at the start of January my lovely friends Naomi and Zoe sent me a 1959 cookbook called Fun With Food: Planned Menus For All Occasions. It struck me as a book that might help out a housewife from a relatively humble background (or one who grew up on wartime rations), whose lifestyle has gone somewhat upmarket and is suddenly faced with hubby's boss coming for dinner. What to do?! Call on this little book by Nella Whitfield.

Tonight we tried one of the menus. It was supposed to be three courses, starting with strawberry cocktail, but I forgot to buy any strawberries. As it was essentially strawberries macerated in kirsch, served in glasses tarted up with either strawberry or lettuce leaves, I considered serving neat kirsch with a lettuce-leaf garnish, but thought better of it.

So, straight onto the chicken pie. The book called it chicken pie, but it also contained ham and, unusually, hard boiled eggs. You start by boiling the skin and bones with stock veg and a bay leaf for a couple of hours to make a stock, then put sliced egg in the bottom of a pie dish, pop chopped chicken and ham on top with some seasonings (including mace and a tiny bit of  grated lemon peel), top it up with stock, whack on a puff pastry lid and bake it.

Let's rewind there. 'Top it up with stock'. The recipe states three-quarters of a cup. I had my misgivings. It said nothing about flouring the chicken a little, so a nice gravy would be made during the cooking. However, I was sticking to the recipe for this, so in the stock went.

I baked the pie and it looked lovely, but when I dished up it was as I'd feared: the stock was still basically stock. Very tasty stock, but not the sort of thing I'd be prepared to include on the plate. I left it in the pie dish. The pie (served with cabbage and sweetcorn) tasted fine but not brilliant, and I couldn't help wondering how much of the flavour had leaked out into the stock. I'd make the pie again, but I'd flour the chicken slightly and use far less stock, just enough to keep it moist.

Pudding was 'Daisy Cream'. No daisies were harmed in the making of this dish. It was a jelly (jello) based dish. The recipe called for pineapple jelly but that wasn't available, so I settled for lemon. It was mixed with evaporated milk and finely-chopped pineapple and glace cherries. It's the sort of thing people laugh at nowadays, but it was actually pretty nice and, as Mr Robot pointed out, essentially a 1950s equivalent of pannacotta. I'll definitely leave the glace cherries out if I make it in future; they didn't introduce anything much flavour-wise, and my attempt at making cherry daisies for the top was lamentable.

So, it was an interesting meal. Which isn't to say it was bad; it didn't wow us but certain flavours, such as the seasoning in the pie, were much more sophisticated than I'd expected, less than a decade after the end of rationing. For its day, this was pretty posh fare to be eating at home. I'll definitely be trying more from the book as some of the puddings look quite good.

FREE PIE!

Not actually a pie, but tasty.

By: Mrs Robot

No, not for you. Free 'pie' for me! Bristol-based pie company Pieminister decided to give everyone at my workplace a free pie pot today. They're not really pies, they're pie filling topped with potato, but they're jolly tasty anyway. Mr Robot would probably go into an extended rant at this point about the lack of pastry, and indeed there was some grumbling round the office about it (not that anyone refused to eat their Pie Pot owing to a lack of pastry).

Some of the range has slightly different fillings to the firm's range of proper pies, which I'm not sure are widely available outside the south-west, though Waitrose stocks them. You can get the chorizo and beef 'Matador' as both a pie and a pot, however. I make all our pies at home, but have enjoyed Pieminister pies with mash in the Raven in Bath over the years. A pint or three, big pile of carbs and meat, what's not to love?

We're pretty good at recycling at Casa Robot; even plastic tubs from the Chinese takeaway go on to have a new life as freezer containers, while foil trays get washed and recycled. I rarely eat things that come in plastic tubs because I picture vast piles of the things accumulating as landfill. However, I've checked online and it looks as though my local council (Wiltshire) accepts rigid plastics at its recycling centres, so I can ditch the guilty feelings. If I ever have to work on Saturdays I treat myself to something like an Innocent Veg Pot, something fast to heat and easy to eat at a desk but good-quality, and this would make an acceptable alternative. I could definitely see myself having one of these for an al desko lunch.

Anyway: pie, free, but I doubt Pieminister realised anyone would do a food blog post, I think they just hoped to get a bunch of hungry journos hooked. I thought I'd be upfront about the source just in case anyone accused me of being 'bought'. (Darling, it takes much more than a pie to buy me...)

Home-made bear pie. NB: does not contain actual bear.
And you can't beat an enamel pie dish - they banish soggy bottoms!