National Trust Pies
1 November 2020 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI made a couple of pies from the National Trust book of traditional desserts; a Codlin Pie with sour apple and quince, and a Royal Pie of mincemeat and fruit with a meringue topping.
Apparently the 'royal' originally referred to a pie topped with royal icing (can this be true? Royal icing wasn't called that until the 19th century), but the more modern version is topped with softer whipped meringue.
Mine was far too wet; I don't know if that was because I didn't peel the apples and grapes (I really couldn't face peeling all those grapes individually!) or if it was because I was scraping out the bottom of the large mincemeat jar I acquired very cheaply (47p) at Easter, or if the pieshell wasn't shallow enough to let the filling dry out. I gave it an extra 20 minutes before putting the meringue on, and poured off a good deal of liquid -- the result of which was that the sticky caramel juices that leaked underneath hardened on the worktop when the dish cooled, and I had considerable difficulty slicing it without being able to lift or rotate the dish in any way! I eventually managed to lever it off once the dish was empty....
It was very tasty, though. The Codlin Pie was less successful, I think because it was really too sour; you were supposed to make it with brown sugar and I used muscovado, which isn't as sweet as white granulated sugar. It wasn't very palatable with yoghurt, though it looked pretty, but it was much nicer with a dollop of Bramley apple curd on top. (This is basically the same as lemon curd, with one of the lemons substituted by a cooking apple; unfortunately the lemons are probably the cheapest ingredient anyway! It tastes pretty much the same as lemon curd, with a hint of apple puree if you focus, but takes an awful lot longer to thicken.)
I also got some fresh suet as a substitute for the dried Atora packet suet, which I've run out of. I have recipes that are old enough to instruct you to 'first grate your suet', but I didn't have any great success with any of them -- I really can't tell if the problem was the fat or just my cooking, though. I tried dumplings which swelled up too large for the pan then disintegrated, boiled leek and bacon roly-poly (which *tasted* delicious but came out pretty soggy after being boiled in a cloth) and baked jam roly-poly, using strongly-flavoured plum jam since the suet still had a distinct aroma of beef to it even after being rendered very slowly in the oven. It didn't taste of meat, but I'm not convinced it was properly cooked in the middle.
The remainder of the melted suet I poured into cake-cases to harden and store; I put them in the freezer, but in winter they would almost certainly be fine for months on the open shelf. I imagine you can use it as a substitute for lard or dripping, since it shares a similar property of a very high melting point.
(Apparently that is why lard makes better pastry; because the pastry is mostly cooked and set before the fragments of fat inside it become liquid, so you get a network of tiny crisp holes left behind which create a melt-in-the-mouth effect.)
Apparently the 'royal' originally referred to a pie topped with royal icing (can this be true? Royal icing wasn't called that until the 19th century), but the more modern version is topped with softer whipped meringue.
Mine was far too wet; I don't know if that was because I didn't peel the apples and grapes (I really couldn't face peeling all those grapes individually!) or if it was because I was scraping out the bottom of the large mincemeat jar I acquired very cheaply (47p) at Easter, or if the pieshell wasn't shallow enough to let the filling dry out. I gave it an extra 20 minutes before putting the meringue on, and poured off a good deal of liquid -- the result of which was that the sticky caramel juices that leaked underneath hardened on the worktop when the dish cooled, and I had considerable difficulty slicing it without being able to lift or rotate the dish in any way! I eventually managed to lever it off once the dish was empty....
It was very tasty, though. The Codlin Pie was less successful, I think because it was really too sour; you were supposed to make it with brown sugar and I used muscovado, which isn't as sweet as white granulated sugar. It wasn't very palatable with yoghurt, though it looked pretty, but it was much nicer with a dollop of Bramley apple curd on top. (This is basically the same as lemon curd, with one of the lemons substituted by a cooking apple; unfortunately the lemons are probably the cheapest ingredient anyway! It tastes pretty much the same as lemon curd, with a hint of apple puree if you focus, but takes an awful lot longer to thicken.)
I also got some fresh suet as a substitute for the dried Atora packet suet, which I've run out of. I have recipes that are old enough to instruct you to 'first grate your suet', but I didn't have any great success with any of them -- I really can't tell if the problem was the fat or just my cooking, though. I tried dumplings which swelled up too large for the pan then disintegrated, boiled leek and bacon roly-poly (which *tasted* delicious but came out pretty soggy after being boiled in a cloth) and baked jam roly-poly, using strongly-flavoured plum jam since the suet still had a distinct aroma of beef to it even after being rendered very slowly in the oven. It didn't taste of meat, but I'm not convinced it was properly cooked in the middle.
The remainder of the melted suet I poured into cake-cases to harden and store; I put them in the freezer, but in winter they would almost certainly be fine for months on the open shelf. I imagine you can use it as a substitute for lard or dripping, since it shares a similar property of a very high melting point.
(Apparently that is why lard makes better pastry; because the pastry is mostly cooked and set before the fragments of fat inside it become liquid, so you get a network of tiny crisp holes left behind which create a melt-in-the-mouth effect.)
