[Sca-cooks] Rooting-through-the-freezer chewets: a late-night improv experiment

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Hullo, the list!

As my subject line suggests, I was hauling various seemingly disparate  
items out of my freezer and cupboard in an attempt to assemble a lunch/ 
snack food to bring to an event I attended on Saturday. This can get  
to be something of a crapshoot if one is new to the period cooking  
thing, but I've got a reasonably good grasp of some of the period  
sources, and the first ingredient on my list sort of leaped out at me  
and suggested where I might follow.

So, the pack of frozen empanada wrappers basically jumped out at me,  
and the rest sort of followed in sequence without too much trouble.  
For those who haven't dealt with these, they're generally rolled-out,  
six-inch flat discs of shortcrust pastry, not quite as short as most  
piecrust, so they can be a little hard and tough when baked, but are  
excellent when fried. This makes them especially good for things like  
empanadas and samosas. The Goya brand even comes in various lurid  
colors that the medieval cook might have especially enjoyed.

The rest was just finding something to put in them; I thought about  
the various small hand-held pie recipes of the 14th through the 17th  
centuries, in a crust pretty clearly meant to be eaten. The filling  
can be meat, fish, or fruit, or a combination; I think there're also  
some with marrow and egg yolks, either alone or in combination with  
the other ingredients.

Here's a pretty typical recipe, lifted from some web site, hence the  
spelling conventions slightly different from my usual:

Chawettys
Take Pork y-sode, & mencyd Datys, and grynd hem smal to-gederys; take  
yolkys of Eyroun, & putte þer-to a gode hepe, & grene chese putte þe- 
to; & whan it ys smal y-now, take Gyngere, Canelle, & melle wyl þi  
commade þer-with, & put in þin cofyns; þan take yolkys of Eyroun hard  
y-sothe, an kerue hem in two, & ley a-boue, & bake hem; & so nogt y- 
closyd, serue forth. (Harleian MS 279)

Basically ground, cooked pork, dried fruit, raw egg yolks to bind,  
soft cheese, seasonings, to make a forcemeat stuffing, garnished with  
boiled egg yolk pieces. This recipe specifies that they should be  
baked, and also apparently that they don't need to be sealed up; other  
recipes say to fry them, or that you can do either, and most recipes  
do call for them to be sealed up or covered in some way. Some recipes  
call for beef instead of pork, some for capon or chicken meat, and  
many use poultry in chunks as the garnish instead of the boiled egg  
yolk, in combination with the main pork or beef stuffing.

Again, as this was largely dictated by what I was pulling out of my  
freezer, there were some deviations from the original formula. I used  
ground pork and beef because I had about a half-pound of each, and no  
chicken or capon, chunks or otherwise. I looked for dates, and,  
failing that, figs or currants (any of which is represented in some  
period recipe for chewets): no dice. I did have some yellow raisins,  
so I chopped and used those. Here's my final stuffing recipe, as best  
as I can recall it.

	~1/2 lb ground beef
	~1/2 lb ground pork
	4 ounces yellow raisins, chopped
	2 egg yolks, raw
	4 ounces soft cheese (I used half Brie -trimmed- and half cream  
cheese, ricotta would have worked, too, but I used what I had; scrag- 
ends of both
	yolks of 5 boiled eggs, halved
	1 tsp sugar (not in the quoted recipe but in several others)
	1 tsp salt
	1/4 tsp ground black pepper
	1/8 tsp ground cloves
	1/8 tsp ground mace
	1/8 tsp ground ginger

I cooked the beef and pork, breaking up crumbs in the pan with a fork,  
adding a little water and letting it simmer without browning for about  
an hour until it was a fairly fine, homogeneous, tender hash, moist  
but without obvious running juice. I cooled that down and added the  
other ingredients, except for the cheese, which I added while the meat  
was hot, to mix it in fully, and the boiled egg yolks, which went in  
during assembly of my chewets.

Now, the two big unanswered questions here are, to my mind, A) what do  
these things look like (no real clear instructions are given for  
shaping or sealing them; not even an illustration! ;-)  ), and B) what  
gives these pastries the name "chewets"?

Manuscript students such as Constance Hieatt have suggested that the  
name probably derives from the Od French term for cabbages, in this  
case, little ones, as in choux-ettes. Taillevent reefers to small  
pastries called lettuce leaves in Scully's edition, along with his  
recipe for little Norse Pies, so I began to suspect it was a reference  
to the shape of the pastry, and not to its ingredients. So, how to  
make a pastry that looks like a cabbage?

I had experimented before with various ways to pleat the edges of the  
pastry discs in order to bring up the sides and create a free-standing  
pastry case for small tarts; it was why I had the empanada wrappers in  
the freezer; it was probably all inspired by watching the Hampton  
Court guys on YouTube. I'm pretty sure that in some cases crusts were  
raised directly from an unrolled lump of dough (basically like raising  
a vessel on a potter's wheel), but since I had pre-rolled discs I  
didn't pursue that.

What I ended up doing was actually shockingly simple: I found that I  
could place an ice-cream scoop of filling in the middle of each  
wrapper, top with a piece of yolk, moisten the wrappers about a half- 
inch from the edge with water, and lift up the edge and start making  
pleats about every half-inch, going around the pastry until I had  
gathered up the entire edge and had it clutched in my fist. If you've  
ever made shu mai you've almost certainly done this. A simple, firm  
twist brought up the edges until they met in the center, sealed by the  
water, and held neatly in place by gravity, friction, starch, and,  
later, a quick, final sealing in boiling oil. There was a very small  
hole in the top of each, mostly sealed by the egg yolk. What you're  
left with is what geologists call an oblate spheroid: a squat ball  
with a small, flat bottom, a slightly pointed top, and the pleats  
looking a fair amount like the overlapping leaves of a small cabbage.

They got fried two or three at a time in about an inch of oil in a  
wok, drained and dusted with sugar.

Fairly quick, once your hands get used to the motions, nicely uniform,  
in spite of using no mold or pan. I could easily see making hundreds  
of these, if need be, without too much trouble, and they really do  
look a bit like little cabbages...

I've got a couple of bad cell-phone photos (my digital camera  
apparently doesn't like the new Snow Leopard OS X and Olympus hasn't  
created new drivers or other software for it in some years, so I  
ordered a new one) of chewets raw and fried. I'll try to put them up  
somewhere accessible later today or tomorrow, if there's interest.

The chewets were pronounced sexy at the event. BTW.

Hoping this will encourage kids to play with their food,

Adamantius







"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter