The Wisdom of Pies part 1

What every mother used to know was that a double-crust pie meant you could feed more people with cheaper ingredients and less of them. My Nan knew that a Robirch's Steak and Kidney pie, heated up in the Baby Belling specially for her only grandchild (me), would feed me so well I'd sleep most of the afternoon. What I know is that pies are today much maligned. People think they're fattening, full of cholesterol and Not a Good Thing for people. Balderdash! I'll tell you why.

If you're eating a pie, you need to adjust the way you think about what you eat. The crust is the carbohydrate part of your food, so you don't need chips or potatoes. (I am aware this is heresy, by the way. I am here to tell you good people how to eat well cheaply, which is an art we have lost by and large in this country. So pie does not need chips.) All a portion of pie needs as accompaniments are fresh vegetables and gravy. With the exception of pork pie if you're living North of the Trent, of course. There pork pies are warmed up, served floating in a sea of mushy peas, and crowned with a sprinkling of mint sauce.

Going back to my childhood, Sunday lunch was completed by pie for pudding. Apple pie or rhubarb pie by preference, but gooseberry pie also featured in season. With custard of course! These days I prefer to make crumble, but that's because I find rolling out pastry is a bit much on the old arms and I prefer to leave pastry rolling for savoury pies. A savoury pie for the main course meant you didn't have a pie for pudding, and vice versa. One can have too much of a good thing, you know!

I moved to South Yorkshire in my late 20s, and there I was introduced to the joys of Meat and Potato Pie by my new in-laws. I never got the recipe though, but I'll describe it to you. A layer of stewed beef on the bottom with some potatoes mixed in it, then thickly sliced potatoes on top of that making a rounded top, with short crust pastry over that, richly decorated. A hole in the middle to let steam out. Baked in medium oven for about 30 - 45 minutes I'd say. But served, always served with boiled carrots and Henderson's Relish. (Google it. They have a website and a Facebook page)

The pastry for pies needn't be this fancy flaky puffy stuff either! A good short pastry takes the crown every time. Mom would use half lard and half marge for hers: all butter is expensive, all lard gives a very short (i.e. crumbly) pastry but not much flavour. Plain flour was always used, but self raising will give a bit more rise to the pastry if that's what you want. Pastry benefits from being kept cold and handled as little as possible. Some women had "good hands" for pastry. I never quite knew what that means, but at a guess it meant they had long fingers and cold hands. The "long fingers" part would mean that, when they are rubbing the fat in to the flour, the minimum amount of flesh comes into contact with the pastry which keeps it cool. Mom always said you should use iced water to mix the pastry with, at the very least the water had to be as cold as you could get it and freshly drawn.

If you're doing a steak and kidney pie you could use a suet pastry. These days you can get vegetable suet, but in my childhood all we had was Atora beef suet. I prefer to make suet pastry as you don't need to rub the fat in, just mix it with a knife until it forms a ball. Then you knead it to make sure it's smooth, and roll out. If you roll it thinly enough, it becomes very crispy which I like.

Some years ago Delia Smith showed how to make a one-crust pie, which was basically rolling the pastry out, putting the filling on the pastry, then bringing the edges up towards the middle and baking it like that. Mom used to make something similar if she had pastry left over: she'd get a saucer, roll the pastry out and line the saucer with it, put jam in the middle and bring the edges up. But Mom would join the edges in the middle. She called it a "turnover".