SC - Vyaunde Furnez sanz noum de chare (was Recipes for Period Bear Meat)

[RuddR at aol.com]

Cindy Renfrow writes:
 
<<Hello!  Here is the only recipe in "Take 1000 Eggs or More" that calls for
bear meat specifically.  This is a very elaborate layered dish in 4 colors,
like a checkerboard lasagne.>>
  
(Snip)

<>
  
(Major snip, in which she gives the recipe: "Vn Vyaunde Furnez sanz noum de 
chare" (Harleian MS 279, Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, p. 49.) and 
her translation.)  
  
A few years ago I made a test version of Vyaund Furnez sanz noum de chare 
(Baked Dish Without a Name, of Meat -- Nameless Meat Pie (?)), of only four 
layers, just to try it out and see what it might do.  It was a 
"cooking-from-the-hip" experiment, and I didn't take any notes; I was going 
to take them next time, if I felt it was worth doing again.  It turned out to 
be a lot of work for not that spectacular a result, so I haven't tried it 
since. It is a long and complicated receipt, and who knows what they really 
had in mind, but here's what I did:
    
I made it as a deep-dish pie, with regular crust in a pie pan, understanding 
that to do it right it would be much larger and deeper than what I made. The 
multi-colored, multi-layered fillings, which are rotated each layer, were 
pretty straight forward, although the color variation wasn't as marked as I 
would have liked. The bottom of the pie was lined with thin strips of bacon 
fat for the lard. The hardest part was figuring out the layers between the 
fillings.  Trying to make sense of the original receipt, I concluded that a 
"tyne y-makyd of eyroun" was a scribal error for a "cyue y-makyd of eyroun" 
(t and c, and u and n might easily be confused in 15th century secretary 
script).  I read  "cyue" as "civee" (u and v being sometimes interchangable), 
which in other contexts is an onion sauce.  A civee of eggs, it occurred to 
me, might be a sauce of minced onions mixed with egg.  I made such a mixture, 
and spread a layer of this over the strips of fat to form a base.  When the 
receipt called for a cyue to be layered, alternating with grease, I concluded 
this referred to the cyue of eyroun that had just been prepared.  I layered 
butter (in place of grease) and the onion and egg mixture between the colored 
ground-meat layers.  When it baked, the egg and onion layer solidified, 
holding the filling together, and setting off the colored layers, giving a 
pronounced striped effect.
  
It tasted alright, and a full-scale one would be impressive.  I should try it 
again
sometime.  Thank you, Cindy, for reminding me of that long-ago experiment.
  
Rudd Rayfield
  
 
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