Tasty pastry
HAVE pie cart will travel. Not that Andrew Driscall’s pie cart is going far, but having a free-standing kitchen and the cart parked at home on the farm means he is free to take off for months at a time without worrying about rent.
As we hunker down for winter, Andrew will take a few months for a summer working holiday in his native Cornwall. Not for the first time, he will be in the kitchens of Colonel Edward Bolitho, the Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall (the UK equivalent of our state governors).
During winter on the Bolitho estates there are shooting parties and many woodcocks are bagged and put in the freezer. Andrew’s mission is to make sure they are used — he makes ready-to-go meals to keep hunters fed and warm the next hunting season.
He has also cooked for royals, including Queen Elizabeth, and even had her grandson, Prince Harry, getting under his feet while he was cooking.
Equipped by courses in hotel management and French cooking, Andrew cooked in private homes in London — the sort of jobs you find by advertising or answering ads in The Lady — Britain’s longest-running women’s magazine.
While working for the exiled King Constantine of Greece he once cooked lunch for three queens — of Greece, her sister the queen of Denmark, and her sisterin-law, the queen of Spain.
Now, when not moonlighting cooking in vice regal households (he also does casual shifts at our Government House) Andrew cooks for Tasmanians going to local markets in the Huon and Channel.
His is not really a pie cart. Andrew, a proper Cornishman, makes proper Cornish pasties. His friend, Ranelagh baker John Glendenning of Summer Kitchen, wants Andrew to crimp a Cornish pasty the proper way.
“But he does everything top-notch and the last thing I want is him making proper Cornish pasties on top of everything else,” said Andrew (which has John trying to follow crimping instructions on YouTube).
John at Summer Kitchen also pre-cooks the beef, swede, potato and onion, whereas the Cornish (and Andrew’s) way is to put them raw into the pastry so that they cook in steam en papillote.
It has all led to John calling his product Improper Cornish Pasties. Cornish pasties are the ultimate “walk-about” food says Andrew, with none of the dripping propensities of the Aussie meat pie.
Legend has it they were built to be dropped down to miners below ground at lunchtime. “Oggy, oggy, oggy” wives would cry as they launched them. “Oi, oi, oi,” miners would say as they caught them.
Andrew’s partner Bonny Burgess is also from Cornwall, although they met in Tasmania. She came to Cygnet to look after Peter Wright’s horse stud in the late 1980s while he was occupied fighting the banning of his memoir Spycatcher with the help of lawyer Malcolm Turnbull.
Bonny says anywhere there is a hole in the ground you will find a Cornishman, which might explain why Cornish pasties are popular in mining communities in Peru and Mexico.
Andrew’s kitchen is a former site office towed to his home in Petcheys Bay, near Cygnet. The first item installed was a 3.5 metre stainless-steel bench found in Launceston. By taking out the passenger seat, Andrew just managed to fit it into his van. “But it was hard up against the gear stick and I couldn’t get reverse, so I had to make sure I did not have to reverse on the way home,” he said.
He also sourced a Hallde machine that slices then dices swedes and potatoes at a great rate. Andrew buys 20kg of swedes a time from a grower of “rock-solid staple vegetables” he met at Judbury Market.
Another machine rumbles potatoes to peel 20kg in five minutes. Most of the year the dutch cream potatoes come from David Griffiths, who grows them at Lymington, and, like Andrew, is a stallholder at Cygnet Market.
Andrew makes a rough puff pastry from scratch, adding chopped butter from the freezer “because I do not want it blending in, I want it to stay in lumps”.
He makes traditional Cornish pasties in two sizes and a vegetarian version with sweet potato, butternut pumpkin, walnuts, roasted red onion and rosemary.
In keeping with the British theme, there are steak and kidney pies and sausage rolls (to a Sally Wise recipe) and a range of doughnuts, buns and crumbles.