Optima Magazine

Jill Glenn gets nostalgic about pastry making

This time last year, on a Summer Dinner Party course at Brook Hall Cookery School, chef Stephen Bulmer observed that if you make pastry from scratch, people – dinner guests in particular – are ridiculously impressed. He refreshed my memory, and ever since I’ve scorned the ready-made stuff (to which I admit I had occasionally resorted) in favour of 8 ounces of this and 4 ounces of that. And he’s right; people are impressed.

Of course, they’ve no reason to be, really. It is tremendously easy. I can’t imagine why I stopped doing it. (I wouldn’t buy ready-cooked vegetables, so why pick up a packet of ready-made shortcrust…?)

Pastry-making is a skill that I learned from my mother, long before I went to primary school. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers and so on. I can trace my technique back through five generations of women to Edith Teasdale, born in Yorkshire two hundred years ago, in August 1808. And probably beyond that too, if I did but know the names of those who went before. Pastry – pie-crust – has been key to the British diet since the Middle Ages. There’s something fabulously grounding about following such as simple tradition.

As a student, in the 1980s (with no money for anything ready-made), I picked up further tips from Delia Smith’s How To Cook – ironically, given that Smith is now doing her single-handed best to disconnect us from cooking with proper ingredients and divert us onto ready-made concoctions that bear little resemblance to the real thing. And she has us all in the palm of her very clean hands: Sainsbury's, for example, apparently sold twice as much Jus-Rol pastry the weekend after the publication of Delia’s controversial How to Cheat at Cooking (and reported a run on frozen mashed potato. Frozen mashed potato?!).

Even if the heritage of pastry-making doesn’t appeal to you, though, there are plenty of other good reasons to make your own. Ingredients, for example. They may call it pastry, but really it’s a concoction of Wheat Flour, Vegetable Oil and Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Water, Sugar, Salt, Emulsifier: Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids. Doesn’t sound quite so appealing, does it? Then there’s quality. Ready-made may be better now than before, but it certainly doesn’t taste as good as something you can throw together (almost literally) in minutes. And don’t give me the convenience argument, either: home-made pastry freezes beautifully. Make double, or triple, and you’re ready for next time with no need to rush down to the supermarket.

When I was a child the accepted wisdom in the family was that I made good cakes, but my mother made better pastry. My hands were too hot. It’s a long-held belief that you need cold hands for pastry; it may seem like an old wives’ tale (passed down from all my grandmothers) but it’s based on sound scientific evidence: essentially keeping the pastry cool prevents the gluten in the flour from developing too quickly, which would make the pastry too ‘elastic’ – difficult to roll, likely to shrink, and tough.

I’ve learned to manage the problem, though, by preparing all my ingredients and then rinsing my hands in ice-cold water before starting. Half-way through I wash them and plunge them into cold water again before resuming. It’s tedious, but effective, and also serves to reduce the dustiness; not liking the feeling of flour is quite a handicap in the pastry-making stakes.

Still daunted? Don’t be. Even if you haven’t had the benefit of five generations of ghost-grandmothers looking over your shoulder and whispering ‘more water… not so fast… just roll that a little thinner’ in your ear, it doesn’t mean that you can’t take up pastry-making. Buy a book, go on a course, download a video clip from the internet. You can even prop your laptop up on the worksurface, locate a demo and rub along in real time (although do try not to get flour over the keyboard…).

It might not be pastry-making as Edith Teasdale envisaged it, but she’d certainly recognise the end result. Go on; try it. Wake up and smell the flour…