48.

This month the Montengarde Culinary Group is hosting a winter feast themed night. Since I’ve been wanting to do a hand raised pie for a while I figured this was a good occasion.

With that in mind I thought I’d do a minced meat pie. Yep, with actual meat. Though in the 16th century they’d just call it a Pye of Beefe. So I’m looking at six recipes from England in the 1590s.

For Pyes of Mutton or Beefe (A Book of Cookrye, England 1591)

Shreaded boiled meat
suet
cloves
mace
pepper
saffron
rasiins
currants
prunes

For fine Pyes of Veal or Mutton (A Book of Cookrye, England 1591)

Shredded boiled meat
suet
hard boiled egg yolks
currants
dates
cloves
mace
cinamon
ginger
pepper
caroway
sugar
verjuice
salt

To make Florentines (A Book of Cookrye, England 1591)

minced boiled meat
suet
hard boiled egg yolks
currants
dates
cinamon
ginger
cloves
mace
salt
sugar
thyme
butter

To boile pie meat (The Good Housewife’s Jewell, England 1596)

Shredded boiled meat
suewt
butter
cloves
mace
raisons
prunes
salt
orange juice

For to make mutton pies (The Good Housewife’s Jewell, England 1596)

minced boiled meat
pepper
cinamon
ginger
cloves
mace
prunes
currants
dates
raisoins
hard boiled egg

To bake a Connie, Veal, or Mutton (The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Iewell, England 1597)

minced boiled meat
hard boiled egg yolk
cloves
mace
ginger
saffron
pepper
salt
butter
gooseberries, grapes, or raisins

Several similarities in those. I’m going to use the recipe for mutton or beef pies from A Book of Cookrye, England 1591

For Pyes of Mutton or Beefe. Shred your meat and Suet togither fine, season it with cloves, mace, Pepper, and same Saffron, great Raisins, Corance and prunes, and so put it into your Pyes.

To this I’m going to add the hard boiled egg yolk, because that seems like an interesting addition in a number of the recipes.

For the crust I’ll be using a variation on my coffin recipe, in that it is essentially the butter coffin with the addition of sugar. This comes up in several of the recipes from A Book of Cookrye, especialy in recipes for Florentines, which are a kind of  pie with minced meat and fruit, it tends to be sweetish. I’ll be using one based on my earlier work. This time though I’m going to try hand forming it.

The finished product was delicious, but needed more moisture. So the version below is slightly different from the one I made.

Pastry

  • 2 cup Flour
  • 12 Egg yolks
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1 egg (for egg wash)
  1. Melt butter
  2. Whisk butter into yolks until beginning to thicken
  3. Whisk in sugar to slowly build structure
  4. Mix in flour slowly with spoon, and then by hand until dough is heavy and accepts no more flour
  5. Roll out thinly (1/4” or less)
  6. Lay in form or form by hand
  7. Fill, cover, eggwash, and bake (for this recipe I will have the lid set aside and add it mid way through baking, at which point I will egg wash)

Beef filling

  • 2.5 lb boiled and shredded or minced beef (I cooked it in my Crock-Pot with 2 cups of water)
  • 1 cup suet minced
  • 1 cup raisins (chopped)
  • 1 cup currants
  • 1 cup prunes (diced)
  • 3 hard boiled egg yolks
  • 2 tsp cloves (ground)
  • 2 tsp mace
  • 1 tbsp pepper (ground)
  • 2 tsp salt
  • pinch saffron
  1. mix 3/4 cup of the suet with the boiled, shredded, and cooled beef
  2. mix in spices, raisins, currants, and prunes
  3. add mixture to formed crust, top with remaining suet, bake at 400 for 20 minutes
  4. remove from oven, cover with pastry lid, cut small holes in it for venting, egg wash
  5. Return to oven, turn temperature down to 325, bake for 45 minutes to 1.5 hours or until lid is golden and filling is heated through.

 

 


1 Comment

Generic Meat Pie – Tomas de Courcy · August 3, 2018 at 1:59 pm

[…] based on my previous work with the minced meat pie I figured out that the general concept of a meat pie in 16th Century England followed a set […]

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