medieval pie – Medieval York: Eulalia Hath a Blogge

Recipe: Frangipane Tart with Paest Royall

I am still proofreading and putting the final touches on the cookbook, and I’ve forced myself to stop putting new recipes in it. That doesn’t mean I’m not still testing recipes, though — for my own enjoyment, for future editions, because I sort of have an obsessive personality — and last night I was playing around with another version of Paest Royall, a 1545 pie crust recipe that I think every SCA cook has tried their hand at. I have started looking at post SCA period historical pastry recipes, which include quantities, and it’s been an interesting process. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery (1796) happens to include a recipe for Royal Paste that I used as a starting point for this experiment. Of course, I needed something to fill the pastry with, so I made a batch of Frangipane with rose water for a more 16th / 17th century flavor profile. (Caveat: I have not thoroughly researched Frangipane, or come across a pre 1600 reference or recipe. Anyone have anything documenting its early history?)

It turned out lovely:

Recipe:

Preheat the oven to 350F.

For the pastry:

1/2 pound flour
1/4 pound butter
2 egg yolks
1 scant teaspoon Kosher salt
Several spoonfuls of water

All ingredients should be at cool room temperature. Mix the salt into the flour, then cut and rub the butter in until the mix resembles wet sand. Incorporate the egg yolks, then add water a spoonful at a time and mix gently until the pastry comes together. Form into a disc and set aside while you prep the filling.

Frangipane:

4 oz finely ground almonds
4 oz sugar
4 oz butter, softened/room temperature
2 eggs
2 T rosewater

Cream together first three ingredients, then gently beat in eggs and rosewater until filling is smooth and uniform.

Roll out the pastry thinly and line a tart pan, pressing into the sides of the pan and trimming the edges. Pour in the filling and spread evenly. Bake for 40-45 minutes or until puffed and golden brown on top. Let cool before serving.

The Pie of Destiny

In a world of mass-produced pastry trash, one woman would rise up and fight on behalf of all pie-kind. She alone would have the strength to wield THE PIE OF DESTINY!

At WCCS, I participated in a lamb “breaking” class — cutting a lamb into primals. It was incredibly interesting. I’ve broken a pig before, but not a sheep; the anatomy is basically the same, but I always want more practice. During the same class, we also slaughtered two roosters. The lamb had been slaughtered the night before. I helped pluck the roosters and watched the gutting process. It was all incredibly interesting!

I took one of the roosters and some of the lamb meat. Later in the day, I had a coffin from the class I taught, and I decided, of course, to fill that coffin with meat. But that wasn’t quite twee enough for me, so I gathered wild herbs and greens from the site. I ended up making a pie with meat from animals slaughtered on site and plants found on site and a crust made on site — it felt like the official unofficial symposium pie.

pieofdestiny1 — Photo by Wulfric. The pie is topless by this point, which is an accurate metaphor for the evening.

Directions for the pastry can be found in my pie crust class handout, linked in the previous post.

Here’s how I did the filling: First, I chopped some fatty lamb meat very small, and mixed it with salt and some very finely minced mint. Then I blanched a mix of nettles, redwood sorrel, fiddleheads, and lemon balm, chopped them finely, and mixed them with the lamb. I packed this into the bottom of the pastry. Then, I removed the breast meat from the rooster and put that on top of the seasoned lamb. Finally, I jointed the rooster and put its legs and wings above the rest of the meat and then put the coffin lid on top.

I baked this pie a looooonnnnng time — probably 4-5 hours, all told! — at 325°F. This meant that the meat got wonderfully tender, with the coffin acting just like a baking dish. To serve, I removed the top crust and let people dig in. The top crust was actually pretty tasty, even though I made the pastry thick. I would have been interested to taste the side/bottom crust, as a lot of fat and juice from the lamb had soaked into it; however, I was trying to keep things relatively tidy, and it seemed easier to just scoop out filling. I personally thought the lamb and rooster were delicious; I liked the flavor profile, and the meat was just so tender and flavorful. The rooster was what chicken wants to taste like.

I felt like this was a “bucket list” pie — making food from animals killed less than 24 hours before hand and plants I gathered. This pie made me really happy.

pieofdestiny2 — Photo by Wulfric, whimsy by Eulalia

Class Handouts from WCCS 2016 are up

If you are here after taking one of my classes yesterday, hi! I hope you had fun and learned a lot! I had a particularly inspiring culinary symposium this year, and can’t wait to dive back into food fun. I’ve posted my class handouts under the files section, or you can click here to read about Grains and Flours of Medieval England or here to read two recipes for standing-crust pies.

All Carnevale Recipes

Food for Dragon’s Mist’s Carnevale AS L

By Mistress Eulalia Piebakere

The Vision

A melding of cuisines from Venice and Constantinople from roughly the time of the Fourth Crusade (the very beginning of the 13th century). Both of these places had independent well-developed food cultures, and each also tended to have an early sort of “fusion” cuisine as each city was quite cosmopolitan and a hub for commerce and trade. Also, in my vision we ignore the fact that crusades were nasty, awful things and that the sacking of Constantinople was objectively terrible.

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Simple gluten free pie crust

…using only historical ingredients!

I made some tiny peach tarts using a recipe from Good Housewife’s Jewell, and made half of them gluten free. This crust was very easy and handled incredibly well, for both the small (in a ramekin) and mini (in a mini muffin tin) versions.

Recipe:

5 oz brown rice flour
2 oz chestnut flour
Pinch salt
Optional: double pinch sugar, for sweet pies only
1 oz butter (or lard — Elizabethan pastry recipes tend to call for butter and this was otherwise vegetarian)
3/8 cup boiling water
1 egg

Mix together dry ingredients.
Combine the butter and boiling water (I used a kettle to heat it — you can also use more water and heat the butter and water together) until the butter is fully melted. A glass measuring cup is ideal.
Add butter-water mixture to dry ingredients and mix vigorously.
When cool enough to handle, add the egg and knead until it forms a smooth dough.
Roll out and use as desired. Makes enough for a single standard crust. (Double recipe for a top crust.)

If you can’t find chestnut flour locally, I order mine from nuts.com.

How to make a proper medieval pie crust

Update March 2018: I have done more work on this recipe and settled on proportions I like even better. This one still works just fine, but if you’d like the new version you can find it, and lots of other recipes, in my cookbook: Tried and True Historical Recipes for Home, Camp, and Feast Hall.

After several years of experimentation, I have developed a method for making hot water pastry that works very well both for rolled crusts and for self-supporting crusts for a wide variety of medieval pies and tarts.

I use imported flour from Lammas Fayre for my pastry and have been extraordinarily happy with it. I recommend their Elizabethan Manchet Blend for this recipe as that most closely matches the evidence I found for what type of flour was used by high medieval English bakers. If you are unable to obtain this flour, you can substitute a mixture of 2 parts whole wheat pastry flour and 1 part unbleached all purpose white flour, although this does not have the same qualities as the heirloom wheat varieties or sieving to yield “white” flour.

This recipe uses lard for fat, so it is only suitable for meat day pies. That said, lard crusts needn’t be exclusive to meat-filled pies — I’ve never had a problem with the taste of lard pastry for sweet pies. For the record, I use leaf lard from heirloom Tamworth hogs, but you can substitute any home-rendered or pure rendered lard. Do NOT substitute shelf stable lard from the grocery store, it is substantially different from natural, real lard.

If you are cooking for a meat day but cannot use lard due to dietary restrictions, rendered beef suet is a fine substitute but has a somewhat stronger flavor. For fish or fast day pies, the evidence I have found suggests that their pastry was made with thick almond milk, but I am not currently satisfied with the pie crusts I have made using this method and plan to do more experimentation before “officially” publishing a recipe.

The historical pie dish I have is much smaller than a modern pie dish. The amount of pastry that I need to line and top that dish is also a good amount to make for a self-supporting pie that isn’t too large. With some experimentation, I found that doubling the quantities I used made enough pastry for a two-crust pie made in a standard modern pie dish. Since I suspect this is more useful to more people, those are the quantities I give here.

Recipe for Hot Water Pastry: (sufficient for one two crust pie in a standard dish)

14 oz flour
2 oz lard
1 cup (8 oz) water — I know it seems excessive, but much of it will boil off

Place the flour in a heat-safe bowl, making a well in it.
Heat the water and lard together until the lard is fully melted and the water has barely begun to bubble.
Pour the heated water and lard into the well in the flour and stir vigorously.
Knead the dough until smooth and elastic.
Separate the dough into two pieces, one roughly twice the size of the other. Roll out both portions of pastry on a lightly floured surface to between ⅛ and ¼ inch thick.
Use the larger piece of pastry as a bottom crust, lining the pie dish (trap); set aside the smaller piece for a top crust.

Note: This recipe works better when the dough is kept warm.

Happy baking!

How to Make Crustardes of Flessh (finally!)

At long last, here is a complete description of how I made Crustardes of Flessh for KASC back in March, including recipes and quantities. Enjoy!

This is the finished pie that I served my judges on Saturday. The one I had for Sunday looked even better, but I didn't get pictures of it. — This is the finished pie that I served my judges on Saturday. The one I had for Sunday looked even better, but I didn’t get pictures of it.

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Medieval Cooking is Complex: A Complete Recipe Annotation

During the process of creating my pie for KASC, I had to not only do a lot of test cooking, but I also had to do a ton of close reading. Reading a medieval recipe is a complex and nuanced endeavor. Here is an example of my process of interpreting a recipe.

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Pastry from Scappi

My Laurel, Master Refr, is the head cook for a feast on Saturday, and I’m helping him with a couple of things. Somewhat humorously, Refr HATES making pie crust, so I am (not surprisingly) helping with that part. Here is the pie recipe he is working from, which is from book five of Scappi:

“165. Various ways to make tuna pies en croute

“Get a skinned tuna belly cut up into whatever sized pieces you like, and let them site an hour in the above spice mixture and salt. Put them into a pastry shell made as directed in recipe 154, of sieved flour, with prunes, dried visciola cherries and sauteed onions in it. Cover the pie over. Bake it in an oven. When it is done, serve it hot.” (Then it gives a few variants on this theme.)

The pie crust part of recipe 154:

“That shell should be made of sieved flour and water with no salt, and should be quite firm. If you want it to be made better, put eggs and butter into it; in Lent, though, you do not use eggs or butter, but only plain water.”

I wasn’t able to find a redaction online for this particular pie crust recipe, though I did find Maestro Eduardo’s version of a pastry-cake from Scappi that has a yeast-leavened dough that is rolled out very thin, almost like pastry. Although they are obviously different in function, the tortiglione dough is similar in that it also contains butter and egg (like the suggested additions to the fish pie pastry).

…Yeah, okay, even I can admit that that’s a reach 🙂 But bear with me, these proportions actually work okay and I’ll explain why.

This is the version of this pastry that I’m trying for this weekend:

1 lb whole wheat pastry flour

1 lb all-purpose unbleached white flour

Generous pinch salt

4 ounces butter

3 whole eggs

1 1/2 cups water

In a large stand mixer, mix together half of the total amount of flour and the salt. Add the butter and eggs and beat on low speed until mixed, then add the remaining flour and mix until combined. It will look crumbly at this stage. Add water and mix until dough is even and smooth.

Divide into four portions. Break off an egg-sized piece of dough from each portion, then form remainder into a coffin (crust) like you are making a pinch-pot. Roll out the reserved portions and use as lids.

This dough handles well for raising coffins. It will be quite tough to a modern palate when it’s baked (lots of water, very little fat), but in my experience it’s very hard to get a functional coffin using butter and eggs in the dough (rather than lard or suet for the fat). I will most likely make a version of this for the high table that doubles the butter and eggs to make a more tender finished product.

Hopefully I’ll have an update on how this went after Saturday!