The Sweeter Side of Life

Most food that is referred to in medieval literature is savoury, hence the focus on fish, meat and pies in my previous posts.  However, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when Gawain is introduced to the ladies at Sir Bertilak’s court, they take him to sit by the fire in their chamber where they call for wine and “Spyce3” (l. 979, defined in the Middle English Dictionary as spices, sugar, spiced cake or sweetmeat).  With no indication of what exactly Sir Gawain is being fed by the courtly ladies, I turned to the medieval cookery book The Forme of Cury – see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/festivities-at-medieval-court.html - which contains a number of recipes for sweet dishes, including “Crispels” (fried pastry rounds basted in honey), “Rysshews of fruit” (fried fruit rissoles) and “Daryols” (custard tart flavoured with saffron).  Honey is, not surprisingly a key sweetener in many of these recipes, but in some cases reference is also made to sugar.  

 A Medieval French market, with a merchant selling sugar on the right.  

Sugar is known to have been used in Polynesia more than 5000 years ago; however, it arrived far more recently in England.  Crusaders returning home from their travels to the Middle East in the late 11^th century referred to sugar, and there is documentation showing that the household of Henry III was using sugar in 1264.  But it was probably not more widely known in England until the 14^th century and even then, since it cost the equivalent of £50 per pound in today’s currency, sugar was very much a luxury item that could only bought by the most affluent households.  In 1448 Margaret Paston wrote to her husband John asking him to buy her “1lb of almonds and 1lb of sugar”.[1]  The Pastons were a Norfolk family and letters they wrote, spanning three generations and covering the period of the Wars of the Roses, have survived to the present and offer a fascinating insight into the family members’ lives, and into the political and social changes of the time.  The Pastons are an example of social mobility, rising swiftly from the peasantry to the gentry as a result of education, and becoming wealthy in the process.  John Paston, like his father, was a lawyer who worked predominantly in London, whilst his wife, Margaret, remained in Norfolk.  Her request for sugar and almonds indicates both the family’s wealth and the more ready availability of desirable foodstuffs in London compared to the countryside. 

We have no idea what Margaret Paston was planning to cook with her almonds and sugar.  Almonds were a widely-used ingredient in medieval cookery, and almond milk, made by steeping almonds in water, was commonly used as an alternative to cows’ milk, both because it did not go off as quickly and also because it could be consumed during dairy-free periods, such as Lent.  Looking through The Forme of Cury – available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8102 - I found the following recipe which contains both sugar and almonds, so could be what Mrs Paston had in mind, and which would, I think, make a suitably accompaniment to a glass of wine for a member of King Arthur’s court. 

The medieval recipe is as follows: 

FRYTOUR BLAUNCHED

Take Almandes blaunched and grynde hem al to doust, do þise in a thynne foile (a thin sheet of dough or pastry). close it þerinnne fast. and fry it in Oile. clarifie hony with Wyne. & bake it þerwith.

My 21^st century version uses an almond cream – made with ground almonds, butter, eggs, sugar and flour – rather than just the ground almonds of the medieval version.  I have eaten them with coffee but also as a post-dinner light-dessert, a la Gawain. 

MEDIEVAL ALMOND PASTRIES:

Ingredients (makes 24):

For the pastry:

200g plain flour

50g butter & 50g Trex or other vegetable shortening (alternatively you could use 100g butter) - diced

Pinch salt & cold water to bind

For the almond cream filling:

55g soft butter

55g caster sugar

55g ground almonds

15g plain flour

1 egg

¼ teaspoon almond essence

Warmed honey to glaze. 

Sieved icing sugar.

Method:

Make the shortcrust pastry by rubbing the fat into the flour using your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.  Stir in the pinch of salt and then add cold water gradually until the mixture starts to come together.  Bring the dough into a ball, wrap in cling film and place in the fridge to rest for between 30 minutes and an hour. 

Make the almond cream filling by creaming together the sugar and butter until soft and fluffy.  Then mix in the beaten egg.  Add the ground almonds, flour and almond essence and mix until combined. 

When the pastry has rested, remove from the fridge.  Allow to return to room temperature and then roll out on a floured surface to a thickness of about ¼”.  Cut out rounds using a 3” (7.5cm) scone cutter.  Put one teaspoon of the almond cream filling on one half of the pastry circle, brush the outside rim with water (using a pastry brush), then fold over the pastry and seal – so you are making little almond parcels (they look like mini Cornish pasties). 

Place the pastry parcels on a floured baking sheet and brush each one with warmed honey (just put a couple of tablespoonfuls of clear honey in a small saucepan and heat gently until it becomes very runny and starts to bubble around the edges). 

Bake in an oven preheated to 200C for 15-20 minutes until golden-brown.  When cool, sprinkle with icing sugar.

---

[1] From The Paston Letters selected and edited by Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 14. 

Food for Stories

The fact that the pilgrim characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales tell their stories in the hope of winning a free meal suggests the heightened importance of food in medieval literature.  Chaucer’s epic work - probably composed between 1380s and his death in 1400 – is a collection of tales all held together by a framing narrative of a group of 30 people going on pilgrimage from London to the tomb of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury.[1]  At the suggestion of Harry Bailly, the host of the Tabard Inn, the Southwark tavern from which the pilgrims set out on their journey, to pass the time the pilgrims tell stories, knowing that whoever “telleth in this caas / Tales of best sentence and moost solaas, / Shal have a soper at oure aller cost / .../ Whan that we come again fro Caunterbury” (General Prologue ll. 797-801).[2]  Had the promise of a free meal not been there, would these varied and engaging stories ever have been told?  

 A 16^th century image of Chaucer’s pilgrims from a manuscript of John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, a continuation of The Canterbury Tales

And the link between food and storytelling continues with one of Chaucer’s storytelling pilgrims being a cook.  In the General Prologue, which acts as an introduction to the anthology of stories, Chaucer introduces the pilgrims.  They are a motley lot, representing a typical range of professions and roles in medieval society, and include the Cook, a man who can “rooste, and seethe, and broille, and frye / Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye” (ll. 383-84); he is a man skilled in a number of cooking processes, namely roasting, boiling, grilling, frying, making stews or soups and baking pies.  The Cook’s culinary talents are, however, somewhat overcast by the sore or abscess that he has on his shin: “on his shyne a mormal hadde he” (l. 386).  Chaucer’s juxtaposition of this physical ailment with the comment that the Cook made the best “blankmanger” (not the blancmange we think o f nowadays, but a dish – white food –composed of minced fowl, cream, rice and almonds) creates a rather unsettling and unsavoury image.  

Chaucer’s Cook from the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (early 15^th century).  The Cook holds a meat hook in his left hand, and his weeping sore can be clearly seen on the lower part of his left leg. 

The distasteful image of the Cook is developed in both the prologue to his story, and the tale itself.  According to Harry Bailly, the Cook does not have a good reputation:  he drains the gravy from his pasties - “For many a pastee hastow laten blood” (l. 4346) – and sells repeatedly warmed-up pies “That hath been twies hoot and twies coold” (l. 4348).  Although only a fragment of The Cook’s Tale exists nowadays, what there is – a young fast-living apprentice, Perkin the Reveller, who is dismissed by his master for his riotous living and seeks accommodation with a friend with similar tastes whose wife is a prostitute – suggests a story of loose-morals with probably little comeuppance for the guilty parties. 

But it is to the Cook’s pies that I turn my attention, since I love both making and eating pies.  The medieval cookbook, The Forme of Cury, - see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/festivities-at-medieval-court.html - includes recipes for meat pie (“tartes of flesh”) and fish pie (“tartes of fysshe”), both of which instruct the cook to make a pastry case – ominously referred to as a “coffin”, but apparently meaning a pre-baked pastry case.  But no recipes for pastry appear to exist in The Forme of Cury; presumably it was such a basic skill that it was taken for granted.  Having read that hot water crust pastry is the oldest form of pastry I used a 21^st century take on it (à la Paul Hollywood)[3]– including butter as well as lard.  And as a filling I used the venison stew from my last post; probably far too decadent a filling for the Cook to spend money on, but one that provides an appropriate touch of luxury in the grey winter months of the English year. 

VENISON PIE

Ingredients (serves 4 - 6):

1 quantity of venison stew – see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/festivities-at-medieval-court.html

For the hot water crust pastry

400g (14oz) plain flour

80g (3oz) strong white flour

100g (3 ½ oz) unsalted butter, cut into cubes

200ml (7 fl oz) water

2 teaspoons salt

120g (4 ½ oz) lard

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200C (G6). 

Make the pastry by sifting the two flours into a large bowl.  Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. 

Bring the water and salt to boil in a saucepan, then add the lard and stir until the lard has melted. 

Pour the lard and water over the flour mixture and stir to form a dough.  Turn the dough onto a floured surface and work into a smooth ball (work quickly as the dough needs to remain warm).  Cut off a third of the dough for the lid, set aside, and roll out the rest of the dough to line the base and sides of the tin or dish you are using (I use a cake tin with a springform base).  Don’t worry if the pastry breaks, but just patch it up making sure there are no cracks or holes. 

When you have lined the tin, pack in the filling closely and up to the top.  Then roll out the remaining pastry to make a lid, arrange it on top and pinch using your fingertips to seal.  Make a couple of holes or knife cuts in the lid and paint with an egg wash (1 egg yolk, a tablespoon of water and a pinch of salt). 

Place in the oven and cook for 45 minutes – 1 hour until golden brown on top. 

Allow to cool in the tin and then release.  

---

[1] Becket, who was enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, was murdered in 1170 by supporters of the king (Henry II) who was in dispute with the primate. 

[2] The Middle English text is cited from A. C. Cawley’s edition of The Canterbury Tales (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975). 

[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/hand-raised_chicken_and_12433