[Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

Sun Feb 20 06:13:55 PST 2005

 How about a 2 stage procedure . Cook the shell and the filling separate. 
Place into shell cooked fillings, cap, egg wash, and return to oven to 
brown..

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius.magister at verizon.net>
To: "Zelina Silverfox" <zelina at gmail.com>; "Cooks within the SCA" 
<sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 3:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

> 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?"
> -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt, 
> 07/29/04
>
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