SATURDAY

10 am - Welcome and Introduction to the Course.This course is for those who want to improve the quality of their pastry and to learn to raise pies to a very high standard of workmanship. We will learn how to do these by re-creating English historical recipes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Our sources will included recipes from Murrell, May, Kidder, Nott, Francatelli and Gouffé.

10.45 -13.00 - Pie pastry - hot water crust, cold water pie crust, pasty paste and lining paste. We will learn to make a variety of pie pastes for different purposes. We will then use them to raise and mould pies.

13.00 - 14.00 - Lunch

14.00 - 15.30 - Early Georgian Court Cookery Techniques - Cullis, ragoos and garnishes. Highly flavoured meat concentrates called cullises (from the French coulis) were essential to the court style of cookery. We will learn to make a cullis and then use it to flavour a ragoo of sweetbreads, which in turn will be used to garnish the main dish of our evening meal - ducks à la braize.

15.30 - 15.45 - Tea

15.45 - 17.00 - Braizes and Daubes. We will learn the technique of larding meat and prepare some wild mallard for braizing, which involves cooking the birds in a braizing pan with hot charcoal placed on its lid as well as fire below.

17.00 - 20.00 - Free

20.00 - Historic Dinner at Wreay Farm

SUNDAY

10.00 - 13.00 - Raised Pies. We will learn the technique of making hot water crust and master the difficult art of raising and ornamenting a large pie.

10.45 - 13.00 -Baked Georgian Puddings. We will make a quince pudding and a tort du moy from Martha Bradley's The British Housewife of 1758, learning how to make a 'collar' of puff paste to contain the pudding mix.

13.00 - 14.00 - Lunch

14.00 - 17.00 Syllabubs and Trifles - the whole afternoon will be devoted to learning how to make these wonderful dairy foods using some remarkable eighteenth century kitchen aids.