Cool hands are the key
HELEN GARLICK, 64, IS FROM NORTH DEVON
Brought up in a grand house in Yorkshire, as a child, I remember our home at Christmas filled with people. Mum and Dad invited all the neighbours over for drinks on 25 December morning and there was always lots of happy chatter. My mum trained as a cordon bleu cook (she was a legal secretary who worked for my dad), and loved to grow her own vegetables and make her own cake, pudding from recipes handed down by her mother – and, best of all, her delicious mince pies. Warm from the oven and frosted with icing sugar, like snow, Mum’s tiny, homemade, scrumptious mince pies piled high on plates to share, melted in your mouth and you’d need to eat at least two.
To make the lightest, fluffiest pastry, Mum told me to ensure my hands were cool (she’d first run her hands under the cold tap) and lift my hands up in the air when rubbing flour into the fat (usually lard but at Christmas she used butter) before adding drops of cold iced water, just enough to make it stick. Rolling out the dough on a marble slab and using round shape-cutters, she’d add her own homemade mincemeat to the pies in little tart trays with shell shapes in the bottom.
Brussel sprouts, of course, were the mainstay in the veg department and she’d cut the sprouts freshly off the Brussel stalks in the garden the day before, and then she’d make a cross in the bottom to make sure they cooked through evenly.
In her last years, Mum even made her own recipe book for 365 days of the year for my three children – her grandkids – Unity,
Will and Lilly to make sure that all of her food wisdom was passed down. They include so many real gems – and a spot of her sense of humour, too. We always miss her at Christmas – and her mince pies.