If you can’t make pastry,” Delia writes, “the very first thing you need to do is forgive yourself and not feel guilty.” As I can make pastry, my first reaction to reading that was to feel smug. But before long, the smugness gave way to a feeling of inadequacy. Learning to make pastry, according to Delia, is of a piece with learning to swim or drive a car, neither of which I can do, both of which seem more useful than the ability to make a decent shortcrust. When the Titanic sank, after all, the swimmers lasted longer than the pastry chefs.
Then inadequacy turned to fear. What if, this week, it turned out I couldn’t, in fact, make pastry? I used to be able to make pastry, but equally, I used to be able to drink all night and wake up with a clear head.
In fact, the last time I did either of those things was at university, where I once successfully made an apple pie from scratch, using a bottle of red wine as an impromptu rolling pin, before drinking the bottle with no noticeable ill effects. What if, I fretted, my pastry making skills had gone the way of my constitution?
Why did I stop making pastry? Well, after leaving university I was: a) broke, and b) no longer had a dishwasher, both of which made making pastry distinctly unattractive. (Making pastry is cheap enough, but buying a fresh bottle of wine to serve as a rolling pin each time is expensive.)
The good news, for new pâtissiers and nervous returners like me, is that Delia provides a lengthy introduction to the world of pastry. First up is shortcrust, which Delia describes as “not fashionable, not clever, not over-rich”, all of which, sadly, are adjectives that can be used equally well, but less complimentarily, to describe me.
Pastry is an alchemy of fat, flour and air, the last of which Delia describes as “the most important ingredient” in the whole affair. There is a running debate over whether or not salt improves the quality of your pastry. Delia, who I am beginning to suspect is secretly in the pocket of the salt industry, believes that pastry “needs some salt, even if it is to be used in the sweet dishes”. As regular readers will know, I’m deeply sceptical about adding salt to almost anything. Yes, it will make your food stay fresh for longer. Nothing rots if you have already eaten it, however. I prefer that approach.
More tricky is getting your fat – whether that is lard, butter, vegetable fat or margarine – soft enough. Delia suggests leaving a note to yourself on the fridge about leaving the butter and the lard out overnight. If, like me, you live in a flat in which the kitchen is on the northern exposure, this won’t work, unless it is the very height of summer. Buy Stork instead.
That done, all you need to do is, very gently, rub the fat into the flour. In next to no time at all, you’ll have pastry. I opt to break it in with Delia’s recipe for “old-fashioned custard tart”, which does not, much to my disappointment, contain the ingredients of an old fashioned cocktail mixed with custard, but is simply custard, in a pastry case.
Still, it’s simple enough, although Delia is quite wrong to advise you to let it go cold: it’s much better fresh from the oven. Next stop: persuading Delia to teach me how to swim.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year; @stephenkb. You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @DeliaOnline
