Rather more delicate than the sturdy English Christmas pudding (as above, popularised in Britain by Queen Victoria’s German husband), you’ll find home-made apple pie, croustade-de pommes, on sale in the markets of southern France, and possibly elsewhere throughout the land, as the final flourish for the Christmas feast. Not your usual common-or-garden apple pie, mind you, but a double-crust tart with a crisp buttery topping rumpled like an unmade bed, enclosing a thick pancake of juicy apples and walnuts. The pastry itself is not as might by expected, the traditional pastry of the French tradition - all-butter shortcrust (pate brissée), or even an elegantly-layered puff pastry (pate feuilleté) - but an all-egg fresh pasta-dough rolled paper-thin and spread with softened butter

Stranger still, the dough-sheets are stretched out on the fists rather than rolled with a rolling-pin, much as the filo pastries of the Ottoman Empire (look to the pastry cooks of Vienna for their ability to set a trend). Pulled-dough requires two people working together on the kitchen table till the sheets are paper-thin. These are then separated, as for baklava, with a brushing of melted butter. The top is rumpled like an unmade bed, so the assembly is very forgiving

The technique requires skill and patience: a suitable task for the Eve, particularly for children, though the chance to get your hands into a warm dough-ball has a calming influence on everyone else, including the cook. Pick your moment (a croustade can be reheated, but is best served hot from the oven), announce your intentions in advance and recruit your sous-chef(s) - any number can participate, just divide the dough into the appropriate number of pieces. Save the trimmings for little fried pasta cookies, nonettes (little nothings), dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar.

Croustade de pommes aux noix

A crisp, buttery double-crust apple pie with a juicy apple and walnut filling. The pastry topping can be brushed with goose-fat, a traditional refinement in goose-rearing territory - Perigord in particular, but also the Languedoc, where my children spent a year in school in Castelnaudary, and our neighbours reared half a dozen Christmas geese - four fattened up for market and the other two potted up as confit, a supply that kept the household in cassoulet every Sunday throughout the winter.

Serves 6-8

The pastry

350g strong plain flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs

200g softened butter

The filling

1k yellow-fleshed apples (reinettes or Golden Delicious)

Either a small glass of Armagnac or apple-brandy

Or the juice and zest of an orange

100g shelled walnuts, roughly chopped

200g caster sugar

To finish

Melted butter for brushing

First make the pastry. Sieve the flour and salt into a bowl. Make a well in the middle and drop in the eggs. Pull the flour into the eggs with your hands, working gradually from the edges, adding water as you go, until you have a soft, smooth dough – you’ll need about 150ml - exactly as if you were making home-made pasta. Form the dough into a ball, cover with cling film and set it aside to rest for half a hour - long enough to soften the gluten in the flour and make the dough more elastic.

Meanwhile, peel, core and slice the apples. Sprinkle with apple-brandy or Armagnac - enough to perfume rather than drown - and leave for an hour or two to absorb the liquor.

Roll or pat out the dough to the thickness of a wedding ring. Spread the surface with the softened butter, leaving a finger’s width of edge unbuttered. Fold the dough over itself in three and roll it out again - you will need to flour it well. Leave it to rest again for 10 minutes. Repeat the operation 3 times. Finally, cut the dough into 2 pieces and roll each out as thin as possible - paper-thin shows real skill. Leave to dry for an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C/Gas4 .

Brush both sheets of pastry with the melted fat or butter. Reserve one sheet, and use as much as you need of the other to line a 25ml diameter tart tin with plenty of overlap. Cut the other half into 3-4 sheets, lay these gently on top of the lining pastry to form layers, leave the edges untrimmed and flopping.

Spread the lining with the ready-soaked apple-slices (reserve any juice) and the walnuts, dusting with sugar as you go.

Top with the reserved pastry-sheet laid on in layers as for the base, leaving the edges floppy and loose. Fold the loose flaps over the top and crumple them like an unmade bed – you may need to snip them about a little. Cut a little hole in the top for the steam to escape.

Bake in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes until the pastry is crisp and well-browned – check after 20 minutes and turn the oven down if necessary.

Sprinkle with a little more sugar and the reserved juice shaken from your fingers onto the hot pastry as soon as the pie comes out of the oven.

p.s. Beloved paid subscribers will shortly be in receipt of recipes for Lambs Wool Wassail and Athol Brose.