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We had a lot of blackberries to use up and Catie was taking the kids to a play date, so I decided that I would make them into a bramble and apple pie (some Twitter observers think that bramble means the bush, but it means both you fucking Southern idiots). Even though I haven’t made a pie for about 40 years and now didn’t have my mum with me to do all the actual work, whilst I licked the spoons and ate the raw pastry. I told Catie that it would probably be horrible. She told me not to make it horrible. I wasn’t intending to do it deliberately. I just thought it was unlikely that I’d be able to make pastry on my first go in ages.
But I am glad I gave it a go. Firstly I discovered that pastry is just made of ingredients. The pie manufacturers don’t let on to that one do they, charging a huge mark up to deliver pastry to the shops and cafes. It’s just made of flour, sugar, milk and egg yolks, with a bit of salt (and if you want to make something brilliant, some grated lemon zest). Obviously because I am me, I did manage to knock the bag of sugar over the floor and get the pastry stuck to my hands and smeared everywhere, but when it came down to it I managed to follow the instructions and get two pies into the oven. And though they didn’t look the prettiest, I had a slice of one and it was amazing. So I had another slice.
I don’t think I’ve felt such satisfaction about anything else that I have done in my life, including getting married and having kids. Why does anyone work when you can just stay at home and make your own food out of ingredients? Give a man a pie and he will eat for a day, but give a man the recipe and he can eat pies for a lifetime.
To be fair I imagined I’d be spending most of July and August doing stuff like this, but life has been too hectic for hobbies. But now I am keen to do more. I want to make bread next and if that goes well I will make new loaves every morning while my family sleeps and maybe start selling them to my neighbours. I could make £5 a day.
Comedy is a stupid business for needy idiots and I might give it up to become a baker. Food and laughter are similar properties - bringing pleasure, but only in the instant, taking longer to prepare than to execute, but there is an honesty in cooking that there will never be in in comedy. Comedians are liars, the whole thing is a charade. Even the refreshingly honest ones are liars. There are so many refreshingly honest comedians these days, that the only way to actually be refreshed is to see one of the liars. But the refreshingly honest ones are worse liars than the actual liars because they’re pretending they are not liars.
But you can’t make a pie out of lies.
You can’t make a pie out of lies.
I don’t think it hyperbole to say that this pie was the most delicious thing ever created in all human history, past, present and future. I surprised myself. I am now a proper countryside person, picking my own food out of hedgerows, cooking my own food and pining for the hardest possible Brexit. Come on over and visit. As long as you can prove that your family is indigenously British for at least 10 generations and preferably for all time.
