Bloody Stupid Johnson's Individual Fruit Pie
'Having anything designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson is like a box of chocolates - you always get that horrible strawberry one which someone else has already sucked and put back in.'
Unfortunately, nothing now remains of the Great Fruit Pie except some etchings made at the time, a rough copy of the original recipe and a few scars on buildings quite a long way from the site. Records tell of the teams of oxen needed to drag the enormous dish into position, the bargeloads of apples brought down the River Ankh for the filling, the catastrophe of the sinking of the Queen of Quirm with her full load of sugar. There are rather more accounts of the explosion that occurred on the second Friday of the cooking process, which caused red-hot short-crust pastry to scythe across a large part of Ankh-Morpork and accounted for the occasional shower of sultanas and deep-frozen baked apple for some days afterwards.
Ingredients
30,000 lb plain flour
30 tons cooking apples, cored peeled and sliced
30,000 teaspoons salt
15,000 lb butter/margarine
1,000 lb sultanas
1,000 lb sugar
Cold water
1 clove
Method
Make the pastry by sifting the flour and salt into a container, then rub in the butter or margarine until the mixture forms 'breadcrumbs'. Then add enough cold water to make it all into a stiff dough. Roll1 out the pastry on a floured surface2 and use half to line the cooking container3 Peel, core and slice the apples4 and combine with the sultanas. Place half in the container. Add the sugar and the clove. Add the rest of the apples, and winch the remaining pastry into place over the top.
The cooking time is unknown, except that it was very clearly far too long.
1. Some well-washed garden rollers were used here, after the specially designed self-propelled rolling pin demolished several houses.
2. Edgeway Street was scrubbed and floured.
3. A disk was cast for this purpose, which now forms the roof of a house in Mollymog Street.
4. Mr Johnson had designed a machine for doing this, but after it stapled one of the foremen to a wall the job was subsequently done by three shifts of men working around the clock.
PS: It is believed that Johnson was vaguely aware of what every cook knows, which is that when baking a big pie some provision must be made to allow the venting of the steam generated. Certainly he had drawn up plans for a 30-foot-high 'whistling blackbird', but this was not, however, cast until a week after the explosion, owing to what would have had to be called bad project management if in fact there had been any project management at all. It is displayed in Hide Park, as a memorial to those caught in the crust.
