Squaring the circle

Tarts and pies, like pizzas, are generally round. So, it's not surprising that the ready-made pastry you buy in supermarkets is also circular. The other two ingredients in one of my favorite easy-to-prepare dishes also happen to be round.

The excellent cow's-milk cheese is a St-Marcellin, from the nearby town of that name. Out in Australia last year, I recall a celebrated local chef saying that he thought of it as one of the finest cheeses in the world. I wouldn't go as far as that, because there are many far more exotic cheeses in France than our everyday St-Marcellin, but it's certainly what you might call excellent basic cheese. I've always got a stock of them in the refrigerator, and I often devour a St-Marcellin between meals.

How do you go about using circular-shaped ingredients to make rectangular pasties? You don't need to be a rocket scientist to discover that it can be done by cutting the pastry into eight equal sectors and arranging the ingredients as follows:

You simply fold over the four edges to obtain a square-shaped pasty. After fifteen minutes in the oven, here's the result:

This is in fact a popular recipe from the town of St-Marcellin, where they refer to these pasties as marcellines.