Hello Dolly!

Back in 2016 I was deep into making pies. Cold cut meat pies: hand raised and mould raised in a steel corset, the elaborate historic ones - the sort you’d expect to see on Downton Abbey - you can see what it was all about on my old insta @wellraisedpies. It made me (relatively) popular at work and fed my deep, unspoken need to show off. Years before, I’d attended one of Ivan Day’s incredible historic food courses on pie making (that’s an adventure for another day), but as well as the fluted steel and copper moulds, he’d shown us how to raise a small pie - known then as a chewit (not the fruity sweety sort) - using a wooden pie dolly to form it. I had the more elaborate metal moulds, I had the pie-making skills, but I didn’t have the dolly and I wanted to make one.

Often the idea of these things feel bigger, scarier and wildly unachievable than necessary. I’d stewed on the idea for years, I knew it would require machinery I didn’t have; and unfathomable skills. Yes, yes I could just have scoured antique shops and bought one. I could have done that.. but why buy if you can make?

I eventually got fed up of imagining making a dolly and decided to get on with it. I contacted a carpenter friend, was offered a day on a lathe, semi-supervised, borrowed chisels and had a couple of warnings about fast spinning chunks of wood and deadly weapons. It was crazy dangerous* and absurdly satisfying. I walked away with my pie dolly, no major injuries and the seed of an idea.

*I’m wiser and more experienced these days

I modified the design on the fly, giving a longer handle than the antique versions for greater control and a grip, and I also introduced a groove to cut the pastry into a level vessel, otherwise this has to happen off the mould. The sequence below shows the dolly in action, raising chewits. These are casual little morsels - no industrial mould, or seams, they require a bit of tenacity, nimble thumb work and a handful of flour to stop them sticking.

My dolly!

I love this thing. Of all the things I’ve made, this one will get handed down. It’s made from a scrap bit of pine - not the kind of wood you would use for it, but it was a practice piece. It is now much more than a pie dolly - quite why every home doesn’t have one I don’t know.

e.g. Grinding spices

the sort that are better done on the flat than within a mortar.

Photographs following are courtesy of the marvellous Alison Purvis-Gisborne

Starting to raise..

The pastry I use is a Tudor recipe, much easier to handle than hot water, and very tasty.

The end of the dolly is dipped in flour before being pushed into the pastry..

fill

crimp

show off!

..then scoff

Big pie

here’s one of the big ones in case you were wondering..

Since then, my dolly has been used for many things, I’ve not made pies for a while, but it now gets good use smashing garlic cloves and more recently, tamping down delft clay in the workshop. It led me to getting a lathe and switching pastry for more permanent media. I realised that while pies are great, and everybody loves them - they don’t last very long.

If you’d like a dolly of your own and can’t see one in the shop, just message me. It’ll be made out of a hard wood such as beech and finished with more finesse than the one in these pictures.

If you’re also interested in learning how to make pies, just send me a message - make sure to head it Pies!