The New Murrey and Blue blog

Medieval cooking is always a fascinating subject, and I don’t doubt that we’ve all seen the word “coffin/coffyn” applied to pastries and pies. Well yes, coffin is a coffin in the usual meaning, but it also seems a sensible enough word to use for a well-filled pie! What we call raised pies, e.g. pork pies and the example in the illustration above, were encased in coffins, with only the contents to be eaten. So no eager sinking of medieval teeth into delicious crisp/flaky/tasty, dissolve-in-the-mouth pastry as created today. No indeed!

If you go to this link https://www.chowhound.com/1517729/pastry-strange-history-sixteenth-century/ you will read that some of these coffins could be several inches thick, and were used as disposable containers simply for the cooking. Can you imagine being confronted by that wonderful pie in the illustration above and NOT wanting to eat the pastry? (To be fair, the illustrated temptation is far from even one inch thick!) But it seems that “….Before the renaissance of pastries from the 16th century onward, pastries — or, more exactly, the dough that’s now used to make pastries — had a much more practical role than it does today. Chefs would shape them into inches-thick boxes and use them as disposable cooking vessels and containers for meat fillings and other savory foods. Once used, the charred pastry dough box was thrown away….”

Having as a child often murdered spare pastry dough and then had it cooked for me by my mother, I know exactly how it must feel to sample baked concrete.

Now I come to something rather tiresome. Tiresome because once again everything brilliant and new was down to the Tudors, and true to this the chowhound.com link directs us to the above book by Terry Breverton. OK, OK, I’m letting my secret Yorkist self have free rein again, for there was indeed a huge change in the 16th century. But could it really have been down to the Tudors? Could there really have been no decent food at all before Bosworth Field? Did our saviour Henry Tudor bring delicious recipes with him for the grateful people to fall upon with cries of joy and relief, having been next to starving throughout the preceding centuries. Looking at Henry’s portraits, he doesn’t give the impression of enjoying anything, let alone food.

Once again I digress. Read the above chowhound.com link and wonder at the thought of pastry several inches thick that would be discarded once it had been sawn open to get at the contents within!