Making Pastry

Oh, the anticipation and the reality
of warm-kitchen days when hands
touched over a huge bowl or fingers
gripped together round a wooden spoon
in snowstorms of flour and avalanches
of butter eggs and sugar both tied
up in aprons red-cheeked and bright-eyed
mixing and stirring – baking and burning
pies and tarts to tempt and delight
Granddad when he came home
and I didn’t touch a crumb
because Nanny made a special
sugar-and-butter-filled pastry just for me
my very own baking-day delicacy

Kim M. Russell, 1st October 2019

Image result for black and white photos of grandma and child making pastry
Image found on Pinterest

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Looking for Sustenance

This Tuesday, Jade is our host for Poetics, and she brings us tasty quotes and poems about food, from poets such as Pablo Neruda, Bill Holm and Sylvia Plath, to name a few.

She says that ‘food is a universal factor in everything that is alive, which is why it is such a rich topic to create poetry around’. Which is why the prompt for the day is food.  We don’t have to use the actual word food, but should write on the topic of food in one (or more) of its many aspects: growing it; eating it;  preparing our favourite recipes; favourite food; hunger, craving, spiritual sustenance, or helping to feed others.

Also shared with What’s Going On? for Sherry’s prompt on 19th June 2025.

43 thoughts on “Making Pastry”

    1. That’s a splendid idea, Sarah! I just hope I have enough. At the moment, I’m putting the final touches to a small anthology of flash fiction and short stories – my first foray into self-publishing. One of my children’s picture book stories was recently long-listed by The Emma Press. I’d like to self-publish that, but I’m no good at illustration.

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  6. My mother was a housewife, and Tuesday was “Baking Day”. She would bake several loaves of bread, and some kind of dessert–cake, pie, cookies, or sticky buns.

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  17. Kim, this warmed my heart in so many ways. You;re lucky to have these memories. I especially liked how you got your own tart! So sweet (literally and metaphorically).

    Now I am craving a pastry, so I’m out the door to my local coffee shop, hee hee hee. Amy

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  20. Such warm and wonderful memories! And how awesome to have a photo! My grandma’s kitchen was dark and tiny. I dont know how she managed to cook such amazing things in a tiny scrap of counter space. Her food was always comforting.

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    1. Thank you, Sherry. Sadly, I didn’t have a suitable photo, so I had to find one online. My grandmother’s kitchen was more of a scullery, so only room for one person really, but I was a skinny little thing so I fitted in quite well!

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  21. Your lines are so delicious and full of warmth, Kim. “…snowstorms of flour and avalanches
    of butter eggs”…Aaaah..and that “special / sugar-and-butter-filled pastry just for” you! I think all grandmas are so full of sweetness.  

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