‘Unlike anything you’ve ever eaten’: how to make lemon Shaker pie

Cooking in January is a very different beast to cooking in December. I don’t just mean the flavours (the dried fruit and spice, and dark, boozy, rich flavours of the festive period are relegated to the backs of pantries and drinks cabinet) or even the sentiment, whereby many will look to lighter,
simpler dishes to counteract the previous month’s excess. The process is different too. My January kitchen is quiet, the cooking or baking less frantic than that of the weeks that preceded it. It’s not performative, and there are no gargantuan grocery deliveries that require half an hour of fridge Tetris. There is no deadline and my days are less full, so baking is a pleasure which punctuates them, rather than an item on a to-do list. The baking becomes an end in itself.

I find the process of making pastry – especially pastry which is designed to flake or crumble, that needn’t have pin-neat edges, or perfect layers – soothing. Whether it’s the act of rubbing the butter into the flour between my fingers, judging the moment when the two are properly combined, or the rolling out of the dough, transforming it from a slightly shaggy mess into a smooth sheet that will fit snugly in a pie dish, pastry-making always feels like a new beginning. And, particularly in the new year, the act of making my own pastry feels like a quiet resistance against the clamour of diets and the self-flagellation that January often brings.

I always like to start the year with a citrusy recipe. Initially it was an unconscious move away from festive flavours but soon it became deliberate, a way of ushering in the New Year with something fresh, something different from the recent mainstays of my kitchen.