Great British Food Christmas 2024

MED I EVAL MARVE LS Very few recipes were officially recorded inMedieval times. Those that have survived give a glimpse through the window of households where money, and time, were no object. “Early recipes tended to belong to the court circles,” explains Ivan. “The clerk, for example, in the royal household. There’s one in particular, written in the 1390s by a cook who worked for King Richard II, printed on a huge roll (probably 30ft long) of vellum– The Forme of Cury .” Within it are vast and varied recipes for a simple pie called a chewitt, taking into account the fashions, religious feasts and fasts of the time. “They really look like the modern pork pie you’d hold in your hand today,” Ivan explains. “Often they’d be filled with pork, sometimes with some cheese added.” Towering over these were painstakingly made chastlette pies, built over many hours to resemble castles, complete with towers and battlements, each concealing its own special filling. “Their pies were very posh,” Ivan adds. “We often don’t think of the Medieval period like this! Another example is the flaumpen. The cook wouldmake a pie, usually filled with pork and cheese and The illustrious past of THE BRITISH PIE Pies today are considered a humble, homely affairs, but a tripback in timewith food history expert IvanDay reveals theywere once fanciful, elaboratemasterpieces designed towoo kings, queens andnobility P ie andmash. Dinner doesn’t get anymore traditional than that. The comforting, soporificmeeting of meltingmeat and lusciously thick gravy, all neatly encased in pastry thatmight be short and crumbly, dense and fudgy, or delicately flakey. We tend to consider pie, in history, as a kind of peasant food. Something any cookwith an oven and a rolling pin could jumble together on awhim. But, says historian IvanDay, our ancestors weremore flamboyant thanwe give themcredit for. some other bits and pieces, and they’d put a lid on it. Before they put it in the oven it would be washed with a mixture of egg yolks and saffron, making it bright yellow. A sharp knife wouldmake eight cuts through the lid, and these would be curled back to look like little flames, so you could see in the inside of the pie. Any pastry left over would be rolled into balls, fried and put in the middle of the pie. It ended up looking like a sunflower, but that wasn’t intentional. We didn’t have sunflowers here in 1390!” P R E S E RV I NG THE SHOOT A practice which began inMedieval times, but wasn’t formally written down until the 18 th Century, is the making of pasties. These were not, though, the crimp edged beef and veg beauties we associate with holidays on theWest coast, but rather a natty form of preservation, designed to impress (and occasionally used for bartering and bribery). “A big hobby in the countryside amongst noblemen was deer hunting. You’d get your mates out with you for a jolly, but you’d need to preserve the meat because it would go off very quickly,” says Ivan. “You can’t salt venison like pork or beef. And so you’dmake a huge pasty or pie.” When he says huge, Ivan means it. These creations would see whole haunches of the animal boned out, butterflied, smothered in herbs and spices, and wrapped in pastry, weighing an impressive 30 to 40lbs. Having been baked in a low oven for perhaps 12 hours, the juices would be tapped off from the underside, with vast quantities of clarified butter pooled in through a funnel on top. The finished product wouldmore often than not be stunning, the meat inside yielding to a jelly-like, unctuous consistency. But it didn’t always go to plan – especially if there was a fault line hiding somewhere in the pastry. The diarist Samuel Pepys, in his writings, spoke of being served a venison pasty that “stank like the devil”. Britain’s fanciestpie Ivan recreated models of what he considers the nation’s most fanciful pies while curating an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge in 2018. Inspired by bakes from the 16 th and 17 th Centuries, they were topped with gilded swans and peacocks, lavished in jewellery. 85 greatbr i t i shfoodawards.com FEATURE | BRI T I SH P I ES