I have just had a run-in with the most irritating dough I've encountered in any recipe for ages. The source of my disappointment was the normally reliable Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1978 edition) and the reason for my excursion into this retro territory was that I'd noticed a recipe for a mincemeat and apple round, and I had a lot of mincemeat. I kept buying it at Christmas. It doesn't have a regular place to live, not being a perennial store cupboard item like plain flour or syrup, and the shelves were quite full at the time, so I kept not being able to see any mincemeat or remember whether I definitely had bought some, and buying another jar.
The Systems Administrator was rather puzzled to discover we had so much, but I promised that mincemeat kept for years, and that it didn't all have to be eaten as mince pies that Christmas. For weeks now I've been meaning to make the mincemeat and apple, but it's never been a good time. Once it morphed into bread and butter pudding, because we had bread that needed using up more urgently than the mincemeat, and the SA is reluctant to share space in the Aga when doing a roast, or anything involving more than one pot. It wasn't really a good time this evening, as I let the chickens out because I felt sorry for them and they didn't go back in until half past seven, but I was determined to make the blessed pudding, after talking about it for so long.
The instructions said to rub the fat into the flour, stir in the sugar, mix in the egg and sufficient milk to give a fairly firm dough. I quote. Fairly firm dough. The quantities were 3 oz butter, 6 oz self raising flour, 3 oz sugar, one egg, 3 to 4 tablespoons of milk. To be on the safe side I only added three tablespoons of milk initially. Never mind fairly firm, the dough was so sloppy it wouldn't hold together in the bowl. I added some flour, consoling myself that I was only aiming at a leavened biscuity sort of thing and not cake, so the proportion of flour was probably not critical. The dough had to be rolled into two rounds, then you were supposed to put the mincemeat and grated apple on one and cover it with the other as a lid, sticking the edges together.
If only. The dough was soft, fragile, and not keen on rolling into a round, or being picked up in one piece once rolled quite thinly (sic). I managed to transfer a roughly circular sheet of pastry on to my greased tray, somewhat larger than a generous side plate but a lot smaller than a smallish dining plate which was as thin as I could get it. The lid was even more reluctant to leave the pastry board in one piece. I remembered I'd read somewhere that you could transfer fragile pastry by using the rolling pin as a support. The lid consented to roll around the pin, unrolled in mid air, stuck to itself, and collapsed on the pile of mincemeat and apple about three inches off centre. I discovered that you could not move it sideways at all, it simply tore, and was reduced to trimming the excess off the side that had overshot and blobbing it on to the opposite side where it was short. The second round of dough, which up to this point had stuck to the pastry board, the rolling pin and my fingers, resolutely refused to stick to the base of the tart.
I squidged the mess together as best I could, painted it with milk as instructed, and sprinkled it with much more than the given quantity of demerara sugar, hoping a sparkly shiny top of cooked sugar would hide a multitude of sins. The book said to cut a small slit in the top but I wasn't touching that blasted pastry any more. I put the tart in the oven, and set the timer for slightly less than the minimum cooking time given in the book, fully expecting to find the tray swimming in burnt liquid out of the mincemeat at the end of it, and the top marked by rivulets of brown ooze where the filling had erupted through the makeshift joins in the pastry.
The timer rang. I opened the door and looked inside the oven, to find a roughly circular, evenly risen, pale gold, gently sparkling mound of pastry, unmarked by any leaking juices from within. You just never know with cooking how it is going to turn out.
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