Posting last week’s recipe for the Hot Chicken & Asparagus Roll started me thinking about Mum’s recipes for homemade pastry.  The first one that came to mind was one that I’ve used many times.  At some stage I must have gotten the recipe from Mum and typed it up, it appears in my recipe folder as ‘Biscuit Pastry’ I’m not quite sure why as I’ve always used it as a sweet pie or tart base.  It is really good with lemon meringue pie and lemon tart .

Looking through Mum’s handwritten recipes I found these three oldies as well.

PASTRY FOR PASTIES

The family loved homemade pasties.  Mum would have made the pastry, rolled it out, cut it into circle shapes, (probably using a bread and butter plate or a saucer as a template) filled them with finely chopped steak, onions and potato and then folded them over and sealed them.

Pastry recipe:

• 2 cups Self Raising flour
• 2 cups plain flour
• 125g lard
• 125g dripping
• 1 cup water

QUICK PASTRY

I’m not completely sure what Mum used this for, but I like the simplicity of just using flour and cream to make the dough.

ROUGH PASTE

I always thought Rough Pastry was a form of puff pastry, but this recipe seems to be something else again, maybe the rough just means that it’s easy to make?  It should have a lovely butter flavour though and now I’ve found it I’ll have to give it a try myself to how it works.

• 250g plain flour
• 90g lard
• 90g margarine
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 egg yolk
• ½ cup water
• Squeeze lemon juice