SC - Piecrust debate continues...

[Philip & Susan Troy]

> Date: Sun, 22 Feb 1998 18:30:53 -0800
> From: david friedman <ddfr at best.com>
> Subject: RE: SC - Cheesecake  and Lent
> 
> At 1:01 PM -0600 2/22/98, Decker, Terry D. wrote:

> >       If you are willing to accept Karen Hess' scholarship that Martha
> >Washington's Booke of Cookery dates to the Elizabethean period, there is a
> >cheesecake recipe (108) using a curded custard filling of a style common to
> >medieval cooking (the recipe is very similar to the one noted above), but
> >uncommon in 17th century cookbooks, which says:
> >
> >       "...yn take a quart of fine flowre, & put ye rest of ye butter to it
> >in little bits, with 4 or 5 spoonfulls of faire water, make ye paste of it &
> >when it is well mingled beat it on a table & soe roule it out ..."
> 
> I am not sure I see the relevance. At the earliest, the recipe you are
> citing is considerably more than a century after the recipe we are
> discussing, on the other side of a fairly major shift in culinary style.
> Even if the filling is similar, there is no reason to suppose that the
> crust is.

True. The simple fact _appears_ to be that we don't really know in any
detail what medieval pie crusts were made of, although there are a few
hints. The only certainty appears to be that several methods were
employed, and there may have been a logical system for determining which
method was used in given circumstances, but we don't seem to be able to
figure out what it was.

>From various recipes, what we seem to be able to deduce is that medieval
pie crusts were largely used as containers, and even if they were
palatable, they probably weren't eaten much. Some medieval recipes
(although I have no references available just now, so I'm working from
memory) caution that a "paast" should be made tender with yolks of eggs.
Bearing in mind the soft, non-glutinous nature of most Northern European
flours of the period, this doesn't seem too difficult. Egg-yolk pastry
tends to get a bit rubbery at times, but is tasty and easily chewed.
Yolks have enough fat in them to act as an effective shortening given
the low glutein and glutenin content, and certainly are rich enough for
the nabobs above the salt.

I also have a vague recollection of a post-period recipe (probably in
Kenelm Digby) that makes a point of stating that the method uses no
butter, which would indicate that butter was used often in other
recipes. The recipe in question calls for cream instead, added to flour
that had been dried in the oven, which would tend to compensate for the
fact that butter contains less water than cream. There may have been
eggs or egg yolks involved also, but I don't remember for sure. If they
were, the result wouldn't be too far from a modern tart pastry recipe
(although presumably less sweet).

Gervase Markham also talks about pastry crusts, but as I recall, he does
only that: he talks about them, but doesn't give recipes, IIRC.
Basically he tells us what types of flour to use for different types of
pastry. I believe he recommended all-rye flour for certain types of meat
pasties, for example, and whole wheat flour pastry for others. He does,
however, specify, IIRC, puff pastry for tarts, which would presumably
use the method Sir Hugh Plat describes in a slightly earlier source:
essentially a modern method.
   
> And I thought Karen Hess' claim was only that the earliest recipes in the
> book were Elizabethan--although I haven't checked.

Agreed. Hess doesn't say that the recipes are all late-medieval /
Renaissance, she just says that some of the recipes are probably that
old, based on the likelihood that the manuscript had been passed through
several generations. She goes on to say that some of the dishes seem to
use a more archaic cooking style than some of the others, and that they
may well be part of earlier versions of the corpus. The same argument,
probably with greater justification, is made for Elinor Fettiplace's
Receipt Book. The point is that we don't really know for sure which is
which. 

My inclination would be to use a relatively tough container-type pastry
for the early-period Great Pies, and a more tender egg-yolk or
almond-milk paste for chewets and tarts of that period. For later
recipes I'd use a tender tart-like pastry or puff pastry for most
purposes, except perhaps for big showpieces like those enormous venison
pies that are meant to keep for a while.

Then, of course, there's the peri-oid method I've used in the past,
which has gotten excellent results, looking like many of the
illustrations for medieval pies, in other words like a slightly domed
hatbox. For that I made a cylindrical container of hot-water/lard paste,
about 4-6 inches high, and covered the meat filling with a circle of
puff pastry, laid on top but not attached (sealing edges with egg wash
or water tends to limit the puffiness of puff pastry). The resulting pie
is pretty spectacular in appearance, being a cylinder with a high domed
lid, usually around eight inches or more in height.

Adamantius
troy at asan.com
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