[Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

[Nancy Kiel]

That kind lady, Mrs. Beeton, has a "Common Crust for Raised Pies," with 1/2 
pint water, 1/12 oz butter, 1 1/2 oz lard, & 1/2 tsp salt to every pound of 
flour, that works very well.  "This paste does  not taste so nice as the 
preceding one [with eggs]..answers just as well for raised pies, for the 
crust is seldom eaten."



Nancy Kiel
nancy_kiel at hotmail.com
Never tease a weasel!
This is very good advice.
For the weasel will not like it
And teasing isn't nice.

>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
>--
>
>