We have some friends coming for dinner tomorrow and I’m going to make a chicken pie, with bacon and a nice sauce, and maybe some mushrooms. My mum was a marvellous pastry maker, and her pies, whatever the filling were always gorgeous, golden and crispy and yummy. The top of the pastry was crisp, the underneath was always soft but not soggy where it absorbed some of the gravy or sauce.
You are supposed to have cool hands to make good pastry, my mum always had hot hands yet her pastry, whether it was short-crust, or sweet and enriched with egg and a little sugar, or suet for a pudding, her pastry was always delicious…. her éclairs, choux filled with cream and decorated with chocolate, light as a feather and full of flavour…. her mince pies, a special sort of white pastry that was so crisp and just sprinkled with a tiny amount of castor sugar… jam tarts, flans, sausage rolls… always perfect, and as good cold as hot…
I don’t suppose my pastry for my chicken pie will be as good as my mum’s but I’ll do my best!
Lois Elsden 
I have thought that there was some sort of majic or charm attached to making pastry. You could follow all the instructions to the tee even the punctuation marks and it wouldn’t turn out right, sometimes not even close. Did they omit to tell you about the majic wand or the alignment of the stars. An old friend of mine was a well driller and I asked him if he could dowse and he replied not until his grandson came along.With his grandson holding grandpas arm they would walk along together till the willow branch bent and he set up his rig and voila water, lots of it. When my poor mother passed away my wife got her recipe book. My mother tried for years to make mustard pickles to no avail. The first time my wife tried it was a success. Maybe shes charmed? I tend to think so because I know i’m lucky to have met her.Happy new year Lois and keep up the good work.
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Thank you David, and a very happy new year to you too! I know exactly what you mean with your magic wand theory… my mum’s gravy, and my dad’s gravy too… I’ve seen them make it a dozen times, and it always seemed in an almost slap-dash way, just the drippings from the roast meat, a bit of water from the vegetables, maybe a stock-cube, a little thickening, maybe a little cream… and the result… it was like savoury nectar, you could have drunk it with a spoon if there had been any left over from being eaten with dinner!
Then there is cousin Shirley’s soup… she lives in Liverpool and we would go and visit, and I remember on miserable cold Lancashire days arriving to a bowl of hot soup and some nice crusty bread, and when we asked about the recipe, Shirley would say, “oh it was just some left over vegetables I had and a bit of gravy, I just whizzed them up together…”
I try to do it and what do I get? Sludge, tasty sludge, but sludge all the same!
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