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Making Apple Pie
by Mo Irvine © 2006
I am making apple pie. I peel and chop the apple, sweet smelling, though slightly floury in texture, then I put it into the pan with a spoonful of water and brown sugar. Very quickly, the kitchen fills with its fragrant smell. I turn off the heat, lift the lid and sprinkle in some ginger, then fetch flour and butter from the larder, and set to making the pastry.
As I wrap the pastry and place it in the fridge to chill, it occurs to me that for the first time in all of my fifty-four years, I have made pastry without consulting the recipe. My mother would be astounded, not at the fact that I didn't read a recipe, but that I had ever needed to. She always thought of me as a cook par excellence, someone to be revered in the kitchen for the culinary excellence that always came forth. She was deluded.
My mother was a lousy cook. I am not being disrespectful by saying this; she admitted it herself. Long after I had fled the coop and married for the first time (I did make rather a habit of it), she admitted to me one day that the best meals she ever had were the ones I brought home from my Thursday afternoon cookery classes at school.
It was there we were taught "Domestic Science", which was deemed a ladylike thing to have knowledge of, even if we only used that knowledge in order to supervise Cook when we grew up and employed one. I went to a Grammar School, a place for the elite, where children with high IQs were creamed off from the hoi polloi and fast-tracked to University (Oxbridge being the most desired, naturally), from whence they became physicists or world leaders. The plaques on the walls of the venerable school hall were thick with the names of famous ex-Girls and Boys. Being taught something as mundane as "Domestic Science" was quite a revolutionary step for our school. Maybe that's why classes didn't begin until we were fourteen.
Pupils were offered the choice of Domestic Science or Woodwork, but I opted for the former, believing that, once I escaped from home, being able to feed myself would perhaps be more important than being able to knock up a coffee table.
I remove the wrapped pastry from the fridge. It shouldn't stay in there too long, only for enough time in order to chill a little, so that it will roll out smoothly and not break apart when you lift it onto the rolling pin and lay it into the pie dish. Actually, that's no big deal. I've had it happen lots of times and I simply do what (I assume) every other person does. I wet my finger under the tap, then smooth it over the pastry until the broken bits are glued together. If it falls apart again when the dish is cooked, who cares?
My mother cooked everything in a pressure cooker. It was a frightening and alien machine, like a spaceship with a handle. The pressure cap on the top had to be adjusted to let off steam, and when this happened, I watched respectfully from the far corner of the kitchen. My mother often asked me to help dish up dinner, but I refused to come near the sink where the pressure cooker would sit, cold water from the tap running over it while it hissed balefully. I wouldn't help until my mother had turned off the tap, lifted the cooker out of the sink, and removed the heavy lid. Then I would scuttle over to peer inside at the three triangular baskets in which nestled the vegetables of the day.
My mother believed it was impossible to overcook food. We had a limited diet: Brussels sprouts, fresh peas or seasonal beans, cabbage and potato. Those are all the vegetables I remember from childhood. Maybe other, more exotic things weren't available to us in post-war middle England . Or perhaps they were there but my mother -- an unadventurous cook, putting it kindly -- was too afraid to try them.
Whatever the reason, our dinners (which were eaten firmly at twelve- noon , which was dinner-time --5.30 being reserved for "tea") were bland and mushy. Slices of beef or lamb, cooked in the pressure cooker beneath the vegetable baskets, were served on red-hot plates from the oven. The oven seemed to be switched on purely for plate-heating purposes. Gravy was made from powdered Bisto, of which I have fond memories and still consider delicious to this day. Bisto concealed a whole host of faults, and lumpy potatoes could be mashed into it.
My father, who grew up on a farm, did not like the taste of meat, so my mother simply served him a plate heaped high with vegetables and drowned in gravy. There was no such thing as vegetarianism in the Midlands in the fifties.
Our Domestic Science teacher was called Miss Henley, who was also Headmistress of the school. We had a Headmaster and a Headmistress; Mr. Clark was our Headmaster, and he died of cancer, though I never found that out until many years later. The C word was not mentioned in those days, even in progressive schools.
Miss Henley was extremely deaf. She wore hearing aids, but I'm not sure whether she ever switched them on or if they simply did not work. She spoke in a very high voice that carried to the back of our large school hall without the benefit of a microphone. She frequently embarrassed us at school assemblies. After the hymns had been sung and the Heathens ushered back into the hall from a nearby corridor, she would spring gleefully to her feet and plant them firmly centre-stage. Then, in what she considered was a quiet voice but which in fact screeched like tomcats fighting, she would announce that the boys could leave, as she had something of a personal nature to discuss with the Girls. Personal was always enunciated slowly and with emphasis, and Girls had a capital G, whereas boys deserved no such accolade, being mere males and as such beyond both her comprehension and her jurisdiction.
The boys would file out, sniggering and smirking, and the remaining Girls would stand, mortified, knowing that she was going to berate us for "unknown solid objects" being jammed down the toilet pans. "Unknown solid objects" was a euphemism for sanitary napkins. This was a subject that those of us who were old enough to be menstruating found deeply embarrassing. The poor kids who were in the First and Second Years had no idea what was being talked about, and would gaze around, mystified, in the hope that someone would give them a clue as to what was going on.
Miss Henley used to tell me that I had a light hand with pastry. Half-fat-to-flour and just a little water, she would chant as she walked behind my table, eagle eyes watching what I was doing. Cold hands make good pastry, she would say. How come I never remembered that before now? I've had a forty-year mental block. Cold hands, warm heart, I think.
I draw the wrapped pastry towards me, flour the worktop, then roll quickly, expertly, spooning in the gingery apple, wetting my fingers and crimping the edges together, brushing the top with water and sprinkling it with brown sugar. There's nothing like a good apple pie.
Washing and drying my hands I think to myself, I should write about this.