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Kitchen Notes

A Good-Natured Pastry
for Bad-Tempered Cooks
For on-the-go pies, delicate French pastry simply doesn’t have the range.
Something more assertive, like a hot-water crust, is required.

By Ruby Tandoh November 19, 2021

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Illustration by Karlotta Freier

ecently, I’ve been going on walks with a small apple pie tucked in my
R anorak pocket. In some of the wilder corners of the English
countryside, and usually in a tempestuous mood, I’ve scaled boulders and
clambered down hills, past waterfalls and over heather-crowned moors, my
pie sitting heavy in my pocket, like a talisman. When I reach some quiet
place—a rock carpeted with moss, or a drystone wall—I perch for a while
and eat the thing without ceremony. More often than not, the robust little
pie makes it to the final destination in better shape than I do.

Pâtisserie does not, as a rule, lend itself to vigorous pursuits. In an essay last
year, Bill Buford described the French apple tart as having “pastry with the
texture of buttered air, and in its presentation a gift, like a painting.” In the
culinary world, pastry is as much a discipline as it is an edible thing. The
pastry section inside a commercial kitchen is widely understood to be a
peaceful enclave amid the chaos and punishing heat. Pastry’s most skilled
practitioners are revered, not just for their expertise in flour, fat, and water
but for their mastery of the more diffuse arts of composure, care, and calm.

I take issue with this sequestering of pastry, I guess, because I do not—in

spite of my work history, in spite of my love of dessert—see myself as a
pastry person. I don’t have cool, delicate fingers for shaping a butter-rich
French pâte brisée, or the finesse needed to line a fluted tart tin with
baroque ruffles of dough. I am prone to fits of pique. A hot temper, like
warm hands, does not ordinarily make for good pastry.

And yet I need pie. I am from a nation of pie eaters: people who will, at a
football game, eat a beef-and-onion pie from a bag with their hands.
Readers of the “Redwall” children’s books, which offer a fantastical vision of
the English Middle Ages, populated with monastic mice and marauding
stoats, might recall the animals’ fondness for pies. These delicacies—wild-
cherry-and-rhubarb pasties, plump whortleberry pies, potato-and-
mushroom turnovers—make an appearance at every feast, and in every
traveller’s knapsack.

The promise of an ambulatory feast is, I think, what makes a hand pie so
promising. Following rapid industrialization in early-twentieth-century
Glasgow, “tuppeny struggles”—small, portable mutton pies—became
popular because they were well suited to a working lunch. Cornish pasties,
from the other end of Great Britain, have their apocryphal roots in mines
and on farms, a fortifying pocket meal with no cutlery required. For these
kinds of on-the-go pies, delicate French pastry simply doesn’t have the
range. Something more assertive is required: a crust that can stand up for
itself, that holds without crumbling and can survive intemperate handling
and a long, brisk walk.

Some of the earliest documented English pies, appearing in “The Forme of

Cury,” a collection of medieval recipes, were called coffyns. These proto-
pies were likely made with a simple flour-and-water pastry, perhaps with a
small amount of fat, designed not to delight the senses but to protect and
enclose the pie filling. The thick dough would act like a sturdy casserole
dish or a couple layers of kitchen foil might today: inside it, the food was
shielded from the fierce and fickle heat of the oven. It’s a technique that
appears to stretch as least as far back as the Romans, though a case could be
made that the English perfected this stodgy art. A robust container for
something precious, the dish predates the contemporary, more sombre use
of the word “coffin” by a few hundred years.

This pastry would morph into hot-water pastry, most recognizable today as
the crust of traditional British pork pies. Making hot-water pastry is a
suitably medieval endeavor; it’s the product of molten lard, steaming water,
and a rough, sleeves-rolled-up approach. Unlike shortcrust, first
documented in 1575, this dough uses a comparatively small amount of fat—
ordinarily lard, but butter is a fine alternative—which is melted into hot
water before being poured, still warm, into the flour. The dough is then
briskly worked by hand: first kneaded, then shaped free-form, usually
without accoutrements such as tart tins. (As Audrey Ellis notes in
“Farmhouse Kitchen,” from 1971, “an expert cook can mould the pastry
around her own fist.”) The pleasure of making hot-water crust is that it’s
antithetical to everything that pastry is supposed to be: this is a good-
natured pastry for bad-tempered cooks.

You can consider these apple hand pies—croissant brown, filled with stewed
fruit, and encrusted with sugar crystals—my English answer to Buford’s
“French Answer to American Apple Pie.” I find that their durable crust
makes them a reliable accomplice for adventures in and out of the kitchen,
ready to be carried like a wallet, a bottle of hand sanitizer, or a lucky amulet.

Apple Hand Pies

Makes 4 small pies

Whether you use butter or lard here is up to you: the lard is arguably more
traditional, but butter will be more familiar to modern palates. Indecisive
cooks can use a combination of the two. I find it preferable to use my hands,
instead of a rolling pin, to shape the dough for these rustic pies, and I
recommend you try it, too—you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to handle,
and how well it responds to touch.

Ingredients

For the apple filling:

1 ⅓ lb. (600 g) Braeburn or Cox apples*

¼ cup (60 g) Demerara sugar
2 Tbsp. (30 g) unsalted butter
1 Tbsp. (10 g) all-purpose flour

*Or similar sweet-tart apples that hold their shape when cooked. Apples
such as Bramley or Granny Smith, which cook to a purée consistency, don’t
work as well here.

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For the Love of Bread

For the pastry:

⅓ cup (75 g) unsalted butter or lard

1 cup plus 3 Tbsp. (200 g) all-purpose flour
1 tsp. (3 g) flaky sea salt, or ½ tsp. (3 g) fine salt
1 egg, lightly beaten, to glaze
1 Tbsp. (15 g) Demerara sugar, to decorate

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and line a large, heavy baking sheet with
baking parchment.

2. Start by preparing the apple filling: peel and core the apples, then cut the
flesh into ½-inch dice.

3. In a sauté pan, combine the diced apple, sugar, and butter. Set over
medium heat and cook, stirring often, for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the
apples are tender through. (This will minimize shrinkage when the pies go
in the oven.)

4. Add the flour, stir well, and cook for a further minute or so, to thicken the
juices. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside.

5. While the apple mixture rests, prepare the pastry. Measure the butter or
lard and ⅓ cup (80 ml) water into a small saucepan and set over low heat,
cooking until the fat has melted and the water is gently steaming. Don’t let
the mixture boil.

6. In a large bowl, combine the flour and salt, then add the hot fat-and-
water mixture. Use a wooden spoon to roughly combine, then use your
hands to finish bringing the warm dough together into a cohesive mass.

7. Count as you knead the dough 20 times—that’s 20 rough stretch-and-

folds.

8. Divide the dough into 4 portions, then divide each portion into 2 small
pieces. Keeping the remaining dough pieces warm in the bowl under a
towel, work with one piece at a time. (If this dough cools too much, it
becomes stiff.)

9. Use your hands to flatten each dough piece to a circle about ½-inch thick,
then set on the parchment-lined tray and gently pat, squeeze, and tease it
out until the circle is thin and about 4 ½ inches in diameter. Heap a quarter
of the still-warm apple mixture onto the middle of the circle, leaving at least
a ½-inch border around the edge. Retrieve a second dough piece and make
another 4 ½-inch circle. Drape this circle over the top of the apple mixture,
press down to seal the pie, and fold the edges in, crimping with your fingers
as you go. The filling should now be encased in a round, dome-like pie.
Repeat with the remaining dough pieces until you have 4 pies arranged on
the baking sheet.

10. Brush the pie tops with the beaten egg (you can use a pastry brush, but,
if I am being honest, I used my fingers), and sprinkle with the Demerara
sugar.

11. Bake for 15 minutes in the oven, then reduce the heat to 350 degrees
and bake for a further 20 to 25 minutes, or until the crust has a deep golden
sheen. Serve at room temperature.

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Ruby Tandoh is a food writer and the author of “Eat Up!”

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