More Mad Cheese Science.

 Thoughts on Pie Crusts.

Continuing experiments on what crust to use for my rhyming cheese tarts. To recap, the recipe I am working off is is from the 15th century Liber cure Cocorum:For flaunes.
Take new chese and grynde hit fayre,
In morter with egges, with out dysware;
Put powder þer to of sugur, I say,
Coloure hit with safrone ful wele þou may;
Put hit in cofyns þat bene fayre,
And bake hit forthe, I thee pray.

For tarts.
Take new cheese and grind it fair,
In [a] mortar with eggs, without doubt;
Put powder thereto of sugar, I say,
Color it with saffron quite well you may;
Put it in coffins that are fair,
And bake it forth, I thee pray.

Now, my research on "fair coffins" lead me down a rabbit hole of pie crusts. "Fair coffin" has been used for pie crusts that are on the light side; meant to be eaten rather than used solely as a casserole dish for the contents. Fortunately, there are several period recipes for coffins for me to choose from.

The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Jewell (1597)

To make fine paste. Take faire flower and wheat, & the yolkes of egges with sweet Butter, melted, mixing all these together with your hands, til it be brought dowe paste, & then make your coffins whether it be for pyes or tartes, then you may put Saffron and suger if you will have it a sweet paste, hauing respect to the true seasoning some vse to put to their paste Beefe or Mutton broth, and some Creame.

Fourme of Curye (1390)

take blank suger & ayroun & flour & make a past with a rollere

Harleian MS. 279 (1420):

.iv. Chawettys Fryidde
Take & make fayre past of flowre & water, Sugre, & Safroun, & Salt

.xiiij. Pety Pernollys.
Take fayre Floure, Safroun, Sugre, & Salt, & make þer-of past

.xx. Pety Pernauntes.—Take fayre Flowre, Sugre, Safroun, an Salt, & make þer-offe fayre past & fayre cofynges;

Harleian MS. 4016 (1450):

Pety pernantes.
Take faire floure, Sugur, Saffron̄, and salt, and make paast þer-of; then̄ make small Coffyns

Chewettes
Take and make faire paste of floure, water, saffron̄, and salt; And make rownde cofyns þere-of...

A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye (1557):

To make pyes of grene apples; make youre coffyn after this maner, take a lyttle fayre water and half a dyche of butter and a little Saffron, and sette all this upon a chafyngdyshe tyll it be hoate then temper your flower with this sayd licuor, and the whyte of two egges and also make your coffyn

A Book of Cookrye (1591):

How to bake Sparrowes or other small birds.
Make paste of fine floure, egges, butter and faire water, therof make Coffins

How to bake pyes of Calves feet.
then make your paste of fine flower with yolkes of Egges, and raise the Coffin square

How to make Chuets.
then take fine flowre, yolkes of Egs, and butter, a little quantitye of rosewater and sugar, then make little coffins

The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (1594 & 1597):

To make Paste, and to raise Coffins.
Take fine flower, and lay it on a boord, and take a certaine of yolkes of Egges as your quantitie of flower is, then take a certaine of Butter and water, and boil them together, but ye must take heed ye put not too many yolks of Egges, for if you doe, it will make it drie and not pleasant in eating: and yee must take heed ye put not in too much Butter for if you doe, it will make it so fine and so short that you cannot raise. And this paste is good to raise all maner of Coffins: Likewise if ye bake Uenison, bake it in the paste above named.

Wow. So many options to choose from. And none of the with quantities. 

Now, I am not a baker and I have never made a pie crust before. In my previous experiments I used either pre-made phyllo dough or pre-made pie crust. I have never made a pie crust before, in my life. I have watched plenty of cooking shows, but that doesn't translate to hands-on experience. So, I went looking for modern recipes to help me. I did not want to use a recipe that called for eggs, as I only had four in the house and I would need them not only for the filling, but for my breakfast the next day.  I did find a recipe on King Arthur Flour's web site for an all butter recipe. I also found some Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch recipes that call for melted butter. So, for a beginner baker, I chose to use one of the "no roll" recipes that didn't call for eggs. I just had to half the quantities on the recipes so that I wouldn't have too much dough left over.

1 cup of all-purpose flour. 

1/4 cup of sugar

8 ounces of salted butter, melted. 

I mixed the flour and sugar together while the butter was melting. I only had AP flour in the house. Once the butter was melted, I mixed it into the flour/sugar mix with a spoon until the dough came together. Then I mixed it together by hand just until I could no longer see any loose flour. I then covered the dough and let it sit for 30 minutes. 

Then I lubed up my tart pans with some Pam and packed the dough into the pans with my fingers. I had enough dough to fill 16 pans. I baked the pans at 400F for 8 minutes, until they just started to brown. They did puff up because I forgot to dock the bottoms before baking. 

I let the shells sit for 30 minutes before touching them. They did not want to come out of the pans. Two would not release at all and were broken. The rest I got to release by turning them upside down and smacking the bottom of the pans with a fork until the shell fell out. The two that broke were used for testing.

The flavor was excellent. Not too sweet and very flakey. More like a shortbread cookie than a pie crust. I bloomed some saffron in hot water while I made the filling. The new basket cheese I had bought was softer than the first batch I bought, which was good. I was able to smoosh the cheese and sugar together in a zip-top bag in a couple of minutes. 

Aside from the different cheese, I made no changes to my filling mix: One beaten egg, equal volume of cheese. Half that volume of sugar. A pinch of saffron bloomed in 2 tablespoons of hot water. All smooshed together. Then spooned into the shells. The tarts were then put back into the oven at 350F and backed for 11 minutes; the filling had puffed up and was no longer sticky. The tarts came out of the oven and allowed to cool. 

Then the hardest part of this experiment: waiting for the tarts to cool. The shells were soft and wobbly when they came out of the oven. The crust did firm up as it cooled. 

The crust is like a flakey shortbread and it just falls apart in your mouth before you even bite down. Then the crust mixes with the cheesecake-like filling providing a decadent combination of flavor and texture. We have plenty of sugary treats at our fingertips, today. This, however, would have been an experience only for the most wealthy. I don't know if the author of "Liber cure Cocorum" intended what I made, but, in the context of my experiment, I am very happy with the end result.
I might try to work the crust more to form more gluten (and dock it in the tart shells when I blind bake it), but I am inordinately pleased with how these turned out, considering that I know next to nothing about pie crusts and that this was my first attempt to make a crust from scratch.

Basically, anything I make that fits in with the original verse will be correct. I will just have to justify my decisions. I have four main goals for this project:

1) Interpret the doggerel into a working recipe. 

2) Explain why I made the choices that I did. 

3) Produce something that not only would not have been out of place on the table of a noble, but something that would be worthy of a noble's table. 
4) Go down as many rabbit holes as possible. 

Did you know that Chepying Walden, in Cambridgeshire, used to grow saffron? So much saffron that it was called Saffron Walden by 1597. Writers of the time said that English saffron was the best produced in the world. "Harrison wrote in 1577 that, 'as the Saffron of England is the most excellent of all other ... so... that [which] groeth about Saffron Walden, on the edge of Essex, sumounteth all the rest and, therefore, bareth worthily the heigher price by sixe pence or twelve pence most commonly in the pounde.'" Walden produced saffron up until the end of the 18th century. 

"Possibly the baker's bill had also run up when Thomas Baker was paid 27s 5d in December 1483.... One expensive purchase about this time was half a pound of saffron for 8s."

real price of that commodity is £272.80
labour value of that commodity is £2,519.00
income value of that commodity is £7,446.00

To put into perspective, saffron from Spain or from the Italians (who got it from North Africa or the Middle East), could cost around  30 shilling a pound. The 8 shillings Thomas the Baker paid for his half pound was a bargain.