[Sca-cooks] Pyes of Pares article author's comments

[Daniel Myers]

A nice thorough response.

Ok, so he used a modern crust recipe and concluded that since it worked 
for preserving the filling then they probably used the same sort of 
crust.

Now what I'm curious about is how well a flour and water crust, with no 
shortening at all, would do at preserving the same filling.  The times 
I've used such a crust to wrap and bake chicken it seemed to form a 
very hard shell around the meat which should keep pathogens out.  
What's more it didn't have to be thick at all (one quarter inch, except 
at the seams where it was thicker), which means it used less flour.  
The crust turned out very tough, but edible if necessary.



On Feb 24, 2004, at 2:13 AM, Phil Anderson wrote:

> I forwarded the digests containing the discussion of Del's Pyes of
> Pares article to him and he sent back the reply below. He can be
> contacted at del at babel.com.au
>
> ===========
>
> Yes, I'm the author of the article, despite the fact that the
> magazine failed to spell my last name correctly.  It is in
> fact "Elson".
>
> I'm happy to discuss any issues with the article off list but
> I don't really have the time to subscribe to this list.  I'm
> on too many mailing lists already, I have a full time job and
> a half, and trying to keep a kingdom together at the moment
> as well.
>
> To answer some specific questions:
>
> * I was aware that there were no period recipes covering how
> to make pastry for these "coffins", and have used the post-period
> sources that I was able to trace back.  The article conjectures
> that *should* pastry have been made in this way in period then
> it *can be proven* to be an effective means of preservation.
> Therefore it is reasonable to conjecture that these pies would
> have been made in this way, based on both the literature and
> scientific evidence presented.

[rest of note snipped]