Bottom-Crust Fruit Pie

Serves 6

Ingredients

200g plain flour

125g butter or, better still, 45g each butter and lard

800g fruit (yellow, red or dark purple plums, damsons, gooseberries,blackberries, apples etc.)

75-90g sugar

a little milk or egg white for glazing, and a bit more sugar

Method

To make the pastry:

1.    Set the oven at 200ºC / Gas 6.

2.    Put the flour into a bowl, cut the fat into chunks and rub them into the flour with your fingertips, lifting up handfuls of both and rubbing them between your fingers till they look like large breadcrumbs.

3.    Stir in a little cold water, about two tablespoonfuls.

4.    Bring the dough together with both hands to form a ball.

5.    It may need a little more water.

6.    The dough should be firm and not at all sticky. If it is, then add a little more flour. Try not to fiddle around with it too much, you will toughen it.

7.    Chill the pastry while you do the fruit.

8.    Cut the plums in half and remove the stones.

9.    If you are using damsons instead you should leave the stones in.

10. Gooseberries should be topped and tailed.

11. Apples should be quartered, cored and sliced into bite-sizes chunks.

12. Take the pastry out of the fridge and roll it out into a rough circle. Use a wine bottle if you are not the sort of person who has a rolling pin.

13. The pastry should be about 30cm in diameter.

14. Lift it on to either a steel baking sheet, a small roasting tin or, most suitable of all, a 25cm metal pie plate. This is easiest to do if you roll the pastry round the rolling pin first, then unroll it on to the tin.

15. Dump the fruit in the centre of the pastry in a pile.

16. Sprinkle with sugar. You will need more for gooseberries and damsons, less for plums and apples.

17. Fold the edges of the pastry over the fruit as far as they will go. They will not and should not, meet in the middle. A pie with a big hole in the middle.

18. Brush the pastry with milk or egg white (use your fingers it will save a brush) and scatter with more sugar.

19. Bake for about 40 minutes in the preheated oven till the pastry is golden brown,the fruit tender, and the juices from the fruit bubbling out a little.