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

Susan Lin susanrlin at gmail.com
Tue Sep 15 15:04:08 PDT 2009


so, can I ask (I guess I can as I am) - where did you get the empanada
wrappers you describe?  I think they would be a heck of a lot easier than
trying to make tons of pie crust.

Shoshanna

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius <
adamantius1 at verizon.net> wrote:

> 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
>
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