Mmmm...Medieval hand pies. [Tasting History react]

We usually think of fast food as a modern invention, but it turns out that in the Middle Ages most people didn't cook at home and actually relied on fast food that was served from public cookshops. They had everything from cooked meat to waffles to something called a risole, one version of which is the medieval equivalent of a McDonald's apple pie. So thank you to Bombas for sponsoring this video as we make some medieval fast food, this time on Tasting History. In the 13th century a French author named Guillaume de Villeneuve wrote something called The Cries of Paris where he detailed the sights and sounds of the streets of medieval Paris. In it he talks of the pre-cooked foods like hot mashed peas, meat pies, garlic sauce, and cheese from champagne and brie that was being sold at public cookshops. There were also sweets sold by street vendors who walked around in the evening with baskets Now any of those, the wafers, waffles, or the risoles could be either sweet or savory. They actually had fish waffles at the time. And when it comes to the risole which are kind of like a hand pie, the 14th century book Le Ménager de Paris has several recipes for ones with pork, one with chestnuts and eggs, another with beef bone marrow, and another with pike or eel meat, all savory. But it is common that risole are made of figs, raisins, roast apples, and nuts peeled to imitate pine nuts and powder of spices. Pine nuts were incredibly common. And a little fine salt and let the paste be well saffroned and then let them be fried in oil and sugar them. Now with sugar and spices this would have definitely been a nicer menu item at any of the cookshops and most of the cookshops actually geared their menu toward the common people or even the poorer people, but there were some that did cater to the upper classes. Now some of the spices used, things like sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg, those were expensive because they had to come all the way from Asia. But saffron was actually widely grown in Spain, France, and even into England during the Middle Ages. Now it wasn't exactly inexpensive but it was definitely more common than you might think. The cost was relative was higher because it was labor intensive to produce and had to be done in a specific time in a specific way. It was often used not just to flavor things but to give a yellow tint to their foods, and that's actually how it's going to be used in this paste recipe. For which you will need two and a half cups or 300 grams of flour, 12 tablespoons or 170 grams of butter cut into small cubes, a quarter cup or 60 milliliters of water, and then a pinch of saffron. So first add the saffron to the water and let it sit for about five minutes, and then sift the flour into a large bowl and add in the butter. Working with your fingertips, smear the butter into the flour until all of the butter is incorporated and you have a nice sandy texture. Then pour the saffron water through a strainer into the bowl and quickly work it in until it forms a dough. Once it all comes together wrap the dough in either a damp cloth or plastic wrap, and let it sit preferably in a cool place like a refrigerator for 10 to 15 minutes to rest while you make your filling. Now if you want to emulate one of the poorer cookshops then you're going to have to leave out all the sugar and spices, but if you want to be like one of the wealthier cookshops then what you'll need is one half cup or 120 grams of dried figs, a quarter cup or 30 grams of raisins, six medium-sized apples, one teaspoon of cinnamon, a half teaspoon of ginger, a half teaspoon of nutmeg, a half cup or 100 grams of sugar, one teaspoon of salt, and a half cup or 60 grams of chopped walnuts, almonds, or hazelnuts. And I found it interesting because it says to use nuts to imitate pine nuts, but pine nuts were rather common in Europe during the Middle Ages so I'm not entirely sure why it says that but there you go. So that is what you need for the filling which then we will stuff into the pastry the same way that you'll stuff your feet into the comfy socks from today's sponsor Bombas. Bombas produces some of the comfiest socks, underwear, shirts, and slippers that I have ever come across and they're all made from premium materials. I actually wear the Bombas t-shirts for most days now, and I very often wear their socks. Most of my socks I think now are Bombas socks, especially my compression socks which I wear on flights, and their athletic socks which have this little tab to protect my ankle from chafing. And ordering from Bombas isn't just about getting a wonderful article of clothing, though you do, but it's also about helping people because for every item sold they donate an item to those in need. Namely socks, underwear, and t-shirts. The most requested items at Shelter's. One item purchased is one item donated. Now they have donated over 150 million items. So you can feel good and do good with Bombas knowing that your purchase has done some real good, and right now new customers will get 20% off of their order. Just head to my link in the description, bombas.com slash tastinghistory and use my code tastinghistory20 at checkout. So the first thing to do for your filling is to chop the figs into small pieces and then mix them with the raisins and soak them for about an hour. Fun fact, figs are not technically fruit. They're a type of edible flower. Now you can soak them either in water, or if you want to follow a 14th century English recipe from the form of curry, they call for them to be soaked in wine. It probably would have been a sweet wine, so that's what I'm using. As they soak, core the apples and cut them in half. Unless you have a dedicated apple core coring thing, do not do this with a knife. You can injure yourself and disable your thumb forever. I haven't done it, but I nearly did, which is unfortunate. And set them on a baking sheet and then roast them in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius for 30 minutes or until they are nice and soft. Then let them cool and chop them into small pieces just like the figs. Then in a large bowl whisk together the spices with the salt and the sugar, and then add in the apples as well as the figs and raisins which have been drained from their water or wine and toss everything to coat. Now for this next part I actually had to look at several other recipes for rissole from the period because it wasn't clear what the texture should be like. I was going to leave them kind of in big chunks so it would be more like a modern apple pie, but most of those old recipes talk about grinding up either the meat or the fruit depending on which you make so it's more of a paste inside. So that's what I'm going to do. So take some of the- Speaking of paste, pasties are called that because they're baked in a crust which was called a paste. Filling and put it into a mortar and grind it until in the end you have something relatively smooth. Or you could just use a blender and add in the nuts which should give it some texture though I still don't think they look anything like pine nuts. Then unwrap your dough and divide it into about a dozen equally sized pieces and form it into balls. Then on a floured surface roll one piece of the dough out into a rough circle about an eighth of an inch thick and take a couple tablespoons of the filling and set it in the center of the dough leaving plenty of dough around the edges. Then fold it over the filling and start to pinch the dough together and really these can be any shape that you want but I found that this half moon shape was the easiest. Once the dough is pressed together use a fork to seal the edge and then set the rissole aside and continue until all of the dough is used up. Then when it comes to the frying lard would have been the most popular fat to use at the time but anything will work for these. All you need is about three or four inches worth in a deep pot and heat it up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius. I've never had a deep fried hand pie. Unfortunately McDonald's stopped deep frying their hand pies. And then carefully set three or four rissole in at a time. Let them fry for about five minutes but keep them moving around fairly often lest they burn to the bottom of the pot. After five minutes or when they're well colored you can take them out of the oil and set them on a rack to dry and sprinkle them while they're still hot with a bit of sugar, and it's because of that sugar and the spices that are in these rissole that makes it so these would have been sold at a nicer cookshop. Similar to the cookshop that is mentioned in a London writing from 1170. There is in London on the riverbank among the ships, the wine for sale, and the vintners cellars a public cookshop. Every day according to the season you will find dishes of meat, roast, fried, or boiled, fish large and small, coarser meat for the poor, finer cuts for the rich, game and fowl large and small. That was William Fitzsteven who was writing around the year 1170, and actually Fitzsteven is probably most famous for being present at the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Beckett who was allegedly murdered when King Henry II, well he wasn't allegedly murdered he was definitely murdered, allegedly on the orders of King Henry II who was a former friend of his when Henry sent four knights to Canterbury Cathedral to murder the Archbishop. Well Fitzsteven was present when that happened, and later on he actually wrote a biography of the then Saint Thomas a Beckett, but the writing that I think is most interesting is a writing that he wrote about the city of London just detailing what it was like at that time. Oh the Pokemon plushie this time is shellmet because it's medieval times, a medieval recipe rather. I get it. Time. Not only does he talk about the publica coquina or public cookshop but he tells us where in the city it is, and says that it caters to both the poor and the wealthy, and he gives us an idea of why wealthy people would be eating at a place like this. If friends unexpectedly arrive at the home of some citizen and they weary and hungry after their journey prefer not to wait until food is bought and cooked or till servants bring water for hands and bread they can instead pay a quick visit to the riverside where anything they might desire is immediately available. So it's kind of like you have company over and you don't really want to cook anything so you're just going to order Thai for the third time this week but instead of Massaman curry he says that those with a fancy for delicacies can obtain for themselves the meat of goose, guinea hen, or woodcock. Finding what they're after is no great chore since all the delicacies are set out in front of them, and those are definitely meats meant for the wealthier classes, and this is probably why goose was meant for the wealthy. How ubiquitous they are today I would have thought they were for the poor. Why this cookshop in particular was worth mentioning in Fitzsteven's writings because most cookshops catered to the common city dwellers. For most people living in towns and cities cooking at home was not usually an option. Most people didn't have kitchens at all. They might have a hearth and many of those people didn't own a pot in which to actually cook anything. For instance that is insane. For instance in 1301 in the city of Colchester only three percent of taxpaying households had any kind of kitchen and records showed that many of the poorest citizens didn't own a pot or any cooking utensils with which to cook their food. So they relied on these public cookshops. Now these would be quite different from getting served at a tavern or an ale house where you would sit down and possibly have a full meal. Instead most shops were either small lean-to sheds or just a cart. They even had carts fitted with mobile ovens for baking small pies. Oh I remember that. And in many towns the streets that housed these shops would come to be called cockrow or cook's row. We can get a better idea of what was sold at these cookshops from a 1450 poem called London Lickpenny. It's about a poor countryman from Kent who comes to London and is immediately beset upon by the owners of these cookshops. Then to Westminster Gate I presently went When the sun was at high prime Cooks to me they took good intent And proffered me bread with ale and wine Ribs of beef both fat and full fine Then unto London I did high Of all the land it beareth the price Hot peas cawed one began to cry Strawberry ripe and cherries in the rice One bad me come near and buy some spice Pepper and saffron they gan me bead But for lack of money I might no speed." In other parts of the city he's offered hot pies and mead and hot sheep's feet. I do find it kind of odd for a modern palate. Interesting though that it specifically mentions pepper and saffron being sold. He couldn't afford it but at least we know that it was available in cities at the time. Now some shops sold multiple things but many specialized in just like one item of food. From the court leet rolls of Norwich in 1287 it mentions one cookshop that only sold pork sausages and puddings while another sold only cheese and egg custards and another only sold mustard. Many cookshops only mustard. I don't know what to say. Specialized in selling sauces like galantine which is made from Galangal from Southeast Asia, and even the wealthier houses would often get their sauces from these shops because it was just cheaper to buy a little sauce kind of pre-made rather than getting your own very expensive spices in bulk. Also these cookshops were kind of the only way that your average citizen was ever going to get to try spices at all. In a treatise from 1300 it talks about a seller of meat and fish pasties which were in Latin bene piperatos. Now pasties and pies were probably the most common food that was sold at these shops, and you could just go buy a pie fully, fully made. They would always have fresh hot pies ready to sell, or you could go to a and buy some meat, take it to the pie maker and tell them that you wanted to take that and make it into a pie, then they would wrap it in pastry and bake it. Now why exactly would you do this? Was it to save money perhaps? Maybe. In London in 1350 a regulation stipulated that no cook shall take more for putting a cape on a rabbit in a pasty than one penny on pain of imprisonment. So essentially you're paying a penny for the pie to be made but you've had to go buy the cape on which on average at the time cost six pennies. So it was seven pennies, but if you bought it pre-made it was also seven pennies. The prices were pretty much fixed at the time so the costs didn't really change unless it was much smaller, much larger. So now there were times depending on the meat that you might save a penny but still I don't think it was the cost that really made people do this. I think you provided your own meat because you didn't know what was in a pie that had already been made. In 1351 for instance a man named Henry Pesche accused a cook named Henry de Passelway of a heinous crime. Pesche and his friend had purchased two capon pasties from the cook and the court records recalled that Henry Pesche and his companions being hungry did not perceive that one of the two said capons was putrid and stinking until they had eaten almost the whole thereof. I do not know food is rotten until you've almost eaten all of it. Wouldn't it smell bad? On they opened the second capon which he produced here in court and found it to be putrid and stinking and an abomination to mankind. The cook of course denied this accusation and so they called eight other cooks from the area to investigate that capon pie and they came to the conclusion that it was rancid, and so the court decreed that Henry de Passelway should have sentence of the pillory there to remain for the space of one week's journey in the day, and that the capon which had been so found to be putrid and stinking should be carried before the said Henry Now at first I was thinking that this system is just rife for issues. Like if you didn't like a cook for some reason you just accuse them of giving you rotten meat and they would end up in the pillory, but it turns out that if those eight other cooks came in and decided that the meat was not rotten then the person who had done the accusing, the accuser, they would have gone to the pillory. We need this for- we need this punishment for false rape accusations. So in either case someone's going to the pillory. So the stakes were rather high and it's because we need to remember just how precious and expensive food was at this time. Today I feel like we are so removed from the production and sometimes even the cooking of our food that we don't realize just how much work and expense goes into it, and especially at a time before industrialization and a lot of government subsidies food was the majority of a lot of people's income. During the Middle Ages it could be 70 to 80 percent of the average person's wages just to feed themselves. Take one of those capon pies for example. It was seven pennies which sounds cheap until you realize that the average laborer in a city made two to three pennies a day. So that pie would have cost them like three days wages. Now it would have been a big pie. It was all of the meat of a large capon, a large castrated rooster, but it was still out of the reach of most people. Now they did make smaller penny pies usually from less expensive meats that would be available to everyone, and during times of extreme hardship like when a harvest failed the government would come in and usually put price caps on how much different things could be charged for. Like in 1379 London pie sellers were ordered to bake pasties of beef at one hay penny just as good as those at a penny. How? If you have this makes no sense. And should they not follow that rule then the cook would actually be forced to pay 80 pence or a half mark which was a lot of money. So sucks to be the cook you know that just kind of losing out in that transaction, and that is probably why cooks were so often accused of selling bad meat or meat that they probably should have tossed away, or swapping in inferior meat for something more expensive like they would be selling a venison pasty but it turned out just to be beef or pork. And when you- Um yeah if I if someone tried to sell me good, sell me that I was eating venison and I was actually eating pork I'd be angry too. You look at court records from this time a lot of them have to do with these these food issues. Like one would be accusing somebody of selling bad fish inside of a pie, and another one would say that the pork was parasitic which is gross but that popped up a lot. Or another one would claim one of the worst offenses that the food had been reheated. There were a lot of ordinances against selling reheated food because it was usually reheated as a way to hide the fact that it was old, and probably should have been tossed out. Another ordinance that kind of went yeah I can imagine that for fridges and microwaves reheated food was not nearly as good. Kind of head this off at the pass was against cooks going to the houses of the wealthy and purchasing leftovers, especially awful because usually that would have been around for some time before it got to into the cook's hands. And often when you look at the court rolls when people do get accused of this they pass the buck. They pass the blame on to the cook's assistant, or very often their wife or their wife's friends who were helping out. They're the ones that made the mistake, and this led in York to an ordinance in 1424 which dictated that the wives of any other artisans should not bake, boil, nor roast food in public shops for sale unless they are competent to do so. But blame the wives all you want, the buck stops with the head cook, and so it's no wonder that during the Middle Ages cooks very often had a somewhat sullied reputation, and this can be seen in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales where one of the characters, Roger of Ware, is a cook at one of these public shops in London. It says that his shop is filled with flies, his pastry is soggy, and he makes this parsley sauce that is so bad that it's basically a curse, and it says he sells pies that hath been twice hot and twice cold. That is he reheats his food, one of the worst offenses. It also has a lot to say about millers, and by millers I mean people who grind grain into flour On top of that describes him as having an ulcer or an open wound on his leg that's always seeping which is really gross. So it's no wonder that if you were able to afford to not frequent these shops you wouldn't frequent these shops, but there were times when even people who had money, who had servants, who had a kitchen would end up patronizing these cookshops. One might be because you're traveling, and you've just come to town. Now a lot of people would travel with some cooks, and food, and everything but it didn't always happen. Like on June 1st in 1267 when Sir Roger Leyburn with a party of knights arrived in Canterbury from France. Their first stop was to buy 68 capon pasties for 16 shillings tuppence from the local cookshop. Or less than for a party of 10 I think he said. Why? Another reason was because of events. Even if you had a kitchen, unless you were in a castle, it wasn't big enough to cook a bunch of food for 100 guests or so. So if you were having a wedding, or a funeral, or a guild dinner, you would have to get catering essentially from these cookshops, and in England, and France, and much of Europe, cook's guilds forced you to use their services if you were having one of these large events. That sounds kind of, kind of draconian. So that was the time that you just needed to- Whatever it is, it sounds evil. Make sure you found a cookshop with a good reputation. Now I am not hosting a guild feast of any kind, and I'm not too worried about rotten meat in this kitchen since I'm doing the cooking, so I think it is time to try these rissole from 14th century France. And here we are fig and apple rissole from medieval France. I have to say these turned out way better than I thought they would. I thought, I thought I would have trouble with the frying but they all turned out really well. The color is nice. They didn't break open and leak. They smell really good. Here we go. That pastry is really good. That's delicious. So the inside like I said is, it's firmed up. It's like ground up, and I do think that that ends up having a better texture than if I let the pieces of apple and everything stay whole, but the flavor is fantastic. That's enough.