Kale and two cheeses in pastry.

Everyone seems to agree that everything you can eat tastes better in pastry. 

Obvious hyperbolic exaggeration? Or was it a television commercial I once wrote for a brand of pastry in the late 1980s? I can’t remember. Jump-cuts of a kind of dysfunctional, in a quirky way, not an angry way, family making pastries: pastry pies, pastry hot dogs, turnovers, tarts, sweet pastries with raspberry jam and custard and dried fruits; and on it went, a real weekend afternoon cook-up, flour everywhere, and an end-super over the vision reading: everything tastes better in pastry; then a quick cut to a three-year old on the floor who has found a piece of dropped pastry and is wrapping it around a small doll and all you can see sticking out of the pastry is its hair and its winky eyes; and the super dissolves to the words: almost everything, and then the brand logo. Later, we had to re-edit the end of the commercial to add a still of the family eating their pastries around the table with the doll, de-floured, sitting prominently next to the jam-faced girl as a pacé sop to the busybodies who thought its oven-bound fate not suitable for family prime time. In the same year that tens of thousands of people were crushed to death in an Armenian earthquake; planes came down; terrorists blew people limb from limb; and infants continued to die in eternal anonymity in medicine-poor India, Africa, China, you name it, television viewers, obsessed about the fate of a doll about to be baked, placed official complaints with a government body set up to cultivate such carping.

*

I used frozen puff pastry from the supermarket. The Coles house brand is fine for the occasional baker; however, a French pâtissier - or even a pâtissière -  might disagree.

Kale is supposed to be bitterer than some other greens such as chard. Let’s find out. I cut the end stalks from a large bunch - about the size of a sheaf of Mother’s Day chrysanthemums - the two or three inches with very little leaf, and set these aside for another use. The leaves I chopped roughly and rinsed and, without spinning off their retained water, wilted them in a pan with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, two or three chopped garlic cloves, and a shower each of cracked pepper and salt.

I made triangular piles of the wilted kale inside the borders of the pastry, already cut to trilaterals, and topped the greenery with some finely chopped onion and thin slices of a herb-flecked cheese and plain mozzarella. I double-folded and bevelled the edges, glazed the tops with milk and scattered them with. sesame seeds. Twenty-five minutes in a reasonably hot oven was enough.

They disappeared in record time. Must have been OK. 

*

The stalks, sautéed with nothing but oil and garlic, became a side dish to grilled porterhouse, reminding me of the silver beet I grew up eating regularly, except without the garlic or oil. It was boiled, too much, like all vegetables then. Silverbeet is an acquired taste, let alone au naturel;  earthy, almost metallic in aftertaste - but once eaten regularly, never forgotten and forever after, craved. Long shimmering black sheets of it were fished out of the pot and served next to stew or roast or casserole. My grandmother, small and dumpy like a gregarious ball, pinched salt from the green crystal salt cellar put out for her visits (living as she did on the other side of the world, I thought, actually it was Clayton) and told me not to salt my food, saying it was bad for me, and - taking another pinch for herself - that we should learn the taste of food without adornment.

She was right. Sauces, French sauces - fatty, salty - might be delicious beyond compare and decadent in equal measure, but ultimately they are just camouflage. Like pastry.