SC - Rapeye Pasties

[Philip & Susan Troy]

> Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 23:41:58 -0400
> From: renfrow at skylands.net (Cindy Renfrow)
> Subject: Re: SC - Pasties in Period?
> 
> >>
> >>To keep this from being a total waste of time, does anyone have a fairly
> >>period recipe for pasties or were they OOP ?
> >>
> >>Elisande de Citeaux

> Hello!  Ask and ye shall receive:
> 
> Harleian MS. 279 - Dyuerse Bake Metis  (c. 1430)
> x.  Rapeye.  Take Dow, & make [th]er-of a brode [th]in cake; [th]en take
> Fygys & Roysonys smal y-grounde, & fyrst y-sode, An a pece of Milwelle or
> lenge y-braid with-al; & take pouder of Pepir, Galyngale, Clowe[3], & mence
> to-gedere, & ley [th]in comede on [th]e cake in [th]e maner of a benecodde,
> y-rollyd with [th]in hond; [th]an ouer-caste thy cake ouer [th]i comade, as
> it wol by-clippe hit; & with a sawcere brerde go round as [th]e comade
> lyith, & kutte hem, & so he is kut & close with-al, & bake or frye it, &
> [th]anne serue it forth.
> 
> My Translation:
> 10.  Rapeye.  Take Dough, & make thereof a broad thin cake; then take Figs
> & Raisins small ground, & first seethed, And a piece of Haddock or ling
> pounded withal; & take powder of Pepper, Galingale, Cloves, & mix together,
> & lay thine mixture on the cake in the manner of a bean-cod, rolled with
> thine hand; then cast thy cake over thy mixture, as it will embrace it; &
> with a saucer rim go round as the mixture lies, & cut them, & so he is cut
> & closed withal, & bake or fry it, & then serve it forth.
> 
> This is a really yummy recipe when made into appetizer or individual
> serving pasties.
> 
> Cindy/Sincgiefu

Hey! This is fascinating! There are recipes for rapee or rapeye in
Taillevent, and in a couple of the English 14th-century sources. The
thing is, they are more or less a thick spiced fruit sauce served over
meat, and very often, fish. No suggestion of a pastry cover from start
to finish in these earlier sources, but I wonder...the fruit and spicing
being the same, and what with the presence of fish in the filling in the
later recipe, I wonder if anyone ever took leftover rapeye _over_ fish,
and sealed it into pastry crusts as a new dish.

This is the type of typical household management 101 stuff / common
sense you'd be likely to find in much later recipe sources, but there
appears to be relatively little of that type of thing in period sources.

Of course, there's no real evidence to support this idea, but I thought
it was an interesting proposition.

As for the availability of pasties in period, apart from the above
example, I'll add a couple more pence: I believe, but am not certain,
offhand, that there are references to pasties in both Piers Plowman and
some of the Robin Hood ballads, but I'm not aware of any pasty recipes
from period in which the dish produced is called "pasty".

Terence Scully uses the term "pasty" in his translations of Taillevent:
I believe it's a recipe for smelts, which calls for baking them in a
pasty, removing them, recooking them separately and serving with a
sauce. The extent to which Scully is justified using the term "pasty" in
such a context is unknown, as far as I'm concerned. The original French
term is, I believe, pastez, which clearly is some type of small pie, but
whether that makes it a pasty I couldn't say.

IIRC, the earliest clearly definable references to pasties in English is
in later documents, such as the Samuel Pepys diaries, which are
contemporary to Digby (mid-to-late 17th century).

Now, if it's pies yer after, now that's a different matter ;  )  !

Adamantius
troy at asan.com
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