[Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

Sat Feb 19 23:17:01 PST 2005

Hullo, the list!

I'm going to take advantage of a mystic confluence of whatnots (in 
other words, it's been a long day culminating in excellent Scotch and 
decent wine) by responding to two people's posts at once... please 
bear with me, if you will.

Also sprach Zelina Silverfox:
>On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:29:22 -0600, Stefan li Rous
><StefanliRous at austin.rr.com> wrote:
>>  UlfR commented:
>>  > Micheal <dmreid at hfx.eastlink.ca> [2005.02.17] wrote:
>>  > > I working away in my kitchen one day when a thought hit me.  It hurt
>>  > (
>>  > > before anyone else gets it)You know they had pots and pans made by
>>  > > hand.
>>  > > Why wouldn`t they have used such for a shaping mold.  Flip the pot
>>  > > bottom
>>  > > side up. Take the pastry throw it on top of your cleanest pot of
>>  > > appropiate
>>  >
>>  > Because said pot -- unless you specially cleaned it -- would have an
>>  > outer covering of soot and various resins from the wood used to cook.
>>  > This is a job that takes time (I would not be surprised if the local
>>  > carpenter could make a wooden form in less time), and also lowers the
>>  > efficency of the pot (because the bright metal has a poorer black body
>>  > behaviour).
>>  Yes, i think the wooden form makes more sense, rather than the pot.
>>  Another point against using the outside of the pot is the shape of the
>>  pot. Most pots are round, since that is a shape easily "thrown" on a
>>  potter's wheel. While I understand that a coffyn is rectangular in
>>  shape, hence the transference of the word to the box we bury people in.

Stefan, can you tell us more about your reasoning in reaching this 
conclusion? I'm not sure I buy the rectangular pie coffin idea: there 
are illustrations of what appear to be pies in various manuscripts, 
and they seem to me to mostly round or elliptical.

I think (and I could be wrong here) that we bury people in long, 
rectangular boxes because, well, a human body is oblong (spherical 
peers notwithstanding). A coffin, though, is simply a case, usually 
roughly in the shape of whatever it's supposed to contain, so it can 
be any shape and still be a coffin, as far as I know: the name does 
not directly imply oblong-ness.

>  > So, if a mold is used, I suspect it would have been a simple wooden
>  > one. But I'm still not convinced that they would have gone to the
>>  expense of a mold. Simply flatten out the dough into a sheet, cut slits
>>  or a wedge at the corners, fold up the sides and meld the corners
>>  together. What's the advantage of a mold over doing that?

Well, the advantage of a mold in general (and I believe this was Da's 
point originally) was that with a mold, you can produce several 
coffins that are largely and functionally identical in a shorter 
period of time than you might produce them freestyle.

>  >
>>  Stefan
>>  --------
>
>Um..question...may sound odd but here goes.
>How thick should the pastry be to free stand 8 inches on the sides
>without collapsing on itself? I am assuming ( I know... bad word) that
>the top would have been done seperately and put on towards the end of
>the final baking stage.

The top can be done separately and added near the end, as you say, or 
it can be added prior to the main baking, helping hold everything 
together and adding structural strength. For sheer cosmetic 
appearance, I love to make a tall, free-standing crust out of 
hot-water dough, then top it, after filling, with an 
appropriately-sized round of puff pastry (which is very old and 
documentable at least to late in the SCA period, if not necessarily 
to the High Middle Ages) .

As for the thickness required to make an eight-inch high side which 
will remain standing, there are some things that we need to consider. 
I'm not sure if eight inches in height is a reasonable expectation 
(maybe there's some textual reference I'm not familiar with, but 
apart from the various English recipes for pies in the shape of 
Towers, eight inches sounds a little high, when most specific recipe 
instructions that refer to height tend to call for one, or in some 
cases two, inches in height for tarts). Be that as it may, modern 
recipes for hot-water crusts (which are similar to some of the later 
period pie crust recipes, but not necessarily to the kind of crust 
you'd use for a 15th or 16th-century Grete Pye) usually call for the 
dough to be between 1/8th (one eighth) and 1/4 (one quarter) inch 
thick. These modern doughs tend to be very short, with a high 
proportion of fat, some of the gluten cooked by the hot water or 
other liquid being used in the dough, and the fat fully incorporated, 
unlike a more typical short or puff pastry, which has chunks or 
laminated layers of fat and dry dough. What this means is that these 
hot-water doughs stiffen up as they cool (the fats tend to be sort of 
hydrogenated, such as lard or butter, which are only liquid when 
heated, and solidify again when cold). That's going to affect the 
stiffness, and ultimately, the structural strength of the dough when 
rolled out.

For a pie that high, probably the thing to do is to make it a quarter 
inch thick, and either A) bake it blind, filled with peas or pie 
beans, and with a belly band of foil or parchment paper, which you 
remove near the end of the baking process, or B) fill the pie with a 
very cold filling that completely conforms to the inside of the 
coffyn (say, a dryish filling of raw, ground meat), with a lid sealed 
carefully in place, but well-vented to prevent the inside from 
becoming steam-puffed or waterlogged. Of course, a filling like that 
is akin to a meat loaf, and produces some juice, especially since a 
large mass of raw meat cooks from the outside in, and produces more 
juices, mass-wise, than a smaller piece of meat.

Making the pastry very stiff, and possibly keeping the shortening 
fat, whatever it may be, to a comparative minimum, might also help. 
Also, I'd suggest being sure to let the pastry rest after the final 
working (whatever that may be: kneading, rolling, forming, etc.). If 
you don't, you run the risk of some dramatic shrinking/tightening in 
the oven, with a lot of burst seams resulting. Don't let this tempt 
you into not kneading the dough sufficiently, though (modern recipes, 
for pies in pans, are big on this, but tenderness and fragility are 
the desired criteria for those recipes, but not this type of thing, 
and badly-kneaded dough is full of invisible seams held together with 
fat which, when it gets hot, split like a dam in an Irwin Allen movie.

I'd also suggest doing this several times, maybe two or three times, 
minimum, as dry runs before you work on the pie that you actually 
need to serve, until you reach the point where you can anticipate the 
problems and prevent them arising before the situation becomes 
crucial.

HTH,

Adamantius
-- 

"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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Holt, 07/29/04