Robin Hood legendary outlaw, star of stage and screen
tends to be portrayed in a much kinder light than the actual outlaws of Medieval England
but one thing the tales do get right is what he eats.
Things like venison pasties served at a feast in Sherwood Forest.
So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video As We Dine with Robin Hood and the real outlaws of Medieval England,
this time on Tasting History.
In one of the oldest surviving tales of Robin Hood called 'Robin Hood and the Monk'
after rescuing Little John from the clutches of the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham
Robin Hood and his band of merry men sit down to a feast in Sherwood Forest.
"They filled up on wine and made him glad, under the leaves so small,
and ate pasties of venison that was good with ale."
So Robin Hood liked his wine, he liked his ale and he liked his venison,
and while venison could refer to a number of animals including boar, badger and even bear
its most common form was deer an animal that would have been quite common in Sherwood Forest throughout the Middle Ages,
and when it comes to English recipes for something that could be called a venison pasty there was one actually written down,
around the same time as the first Robin Hood stories were being written down.
That is the 15th Century Harleian Manuscript 279's recipe for "Venyson y-bake.
Take hocks of venison, and parboil them in fair water and salt; when the flesh is fair boiled make Fair paste and cast thine venison thereon;
and cast above and beneath powdered pepper, ginger, and salt, and then set it in the oven and let it bake and serve forth."
So the filling is definitely simpler than something like a modern cornish pasty which has different vegetables added in
but with all of those spices which I'm assuming Robin Hood stole from Prince John,
"No! No! No!"
there's no reason to think that these Medieval pasties couldn't have just as much flavor as the modern pasty
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Now to make our Medieval venison pasties what you'll need is: one tablespoon of pepper, two teaspoons of ginger,
and one teaspoon of salt all mixed together. Then about two pounds or a kilogram of venison,
and which cut of venison you have really is going to be quite important because I have a loin
which is the most common that you're going to find at any butcher if they even have venison,
and that is very simple you just have to boil it like the recipe says but
if you get a leg it is going to be much tougher and so I would follow the advice of the 14th century French cookbook 'Le Menagier De Paris'
which says it should be boiled "then lard it to make pasties."
Larding is a process of inserting fat back or unrendered lard into the meat. You can actually get
needles that let you attach a long strip of the lard and sew it into the meat. I really, really want to try it one day
but it's really not necessary for this cut especially how we're going to prepare it.
With the loin all you have to do is get a pot of well salted water, bring it to a boil and then let the venison boil for about 30 minutes.
And the recipe says it should be parboiled because you don't want it entirely cooked as it is going to spend quite some time in the oven.
Now while it boils make fair paste,
not the kind Ralph Wiggum enjoys but simply dough and that's actually where the term pasty comes from.
It was basically any food that was baked inside of paste or pasty and that's also where we get the term pasta.
So here is one way to make a Medieval fair paste.
You'll need: six cups or 750 grams of whole wheat flour. You could also use white flour and that will make them lighter both in color and texture
but whole wheat flour is probably what Robin Hood would have access to.
One cup or 226 grams of salted butter, 1 cup or 235 milliliters of water, and two egg yolks.
Now this should be enough dough for eight large pasties plus a little bit left over to make some decoration
or just because I hate running out of dough so I always make more than I need.
So first mix the butter into the flour with your fingers until well incorporated then mix the egg yolks with the water and add it to the dough.
Work the dough until it starts to come together.
Now something to know about whole wheat flour is it soaks up a lot more water than regular white flour,
and I did account for that in the recipe but even so you might have to add in a little bit more but just add it in a tablespoon at a time.
Then knead the dough for a few minutes and you're not looking to get it as well needed as bread dough
but a lot more so than say pie crust because this really needs to hold together.
Then flatten it out and cover it while your venison finishes boiling.
If you do make the dough ahead of time I would definitely put it in the fridge.
Now once the venison is parboiled take it out and give it a few minutes to rest before slicing it into small pieces.
Then roll a piece of dough out and cut a circle about eight inches wide a bowl works well for that.
Then sprinkle a large pinch of the spice onto the dough and set some of the meat in the center.
Then dust it with a bit more spice.
And then you can form your pasty and there are different ways of doing it.
Today the traditional way is to fold the two sides up and then crimp them and you can either put it on its side or have the crimp on top.
The shape was also very popular in the Middle Ages but so was making it into a circle.
You would basically take another piece of dough and put it on top and then crimp the edges around that.
This also lets you put a little decoration on top if you want.
Either way once they're crimped you can go ahead and bake them or you can add a little bit of an egg wash,
and this is going to make it a little bit prettier, a little shinier and I know it's not in the original recipe
but Robin Hood was a fan of pretty things I mean look it made Marion
she was a fox.
And once they're egg washed you can set them one tray at a time in the lower part of the oven
at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 205 Celsius for 15 minutes and then lower the heat to 350, and bake for another 20 to 25 minutes.
Now I know what you're thinking...
Robin Hood may have been flitting about Sherwood Forest with a venison pasty in one hand and a tankard of ale in the other
but he was a fictional character. I want to know what the actual Medieval outlaw would have been like at the time and
once you make sure that you've subscribed to Tasting History, I'll tell you.
"Bread and wine they had enough, and numbles of the deer. Swans and pheasants they had full good, and fowl of the river,
There lacked not even the littlest bird, that ever was bred on a briar."
That is from the 16th century 'A Littel Gest of Robyn Hode' or 'A Little Adventure of Robin Hood'
and is describing yet another Feast that he and his merry men are having in Sherwood Forest.
And while it may seem like quite a meal for a group of forest-dwelling confirmed bachelors,
it's actually probably not all that off from what the actual outlaws might have been eating.
See the forests of England were teeming with wildlife including swans, pheasant, and deer.
Also it says that they're eating the 'numbles' of the deer. That is the organs, the offal of the deer and sometimes they would take those and bake them into a numble pie,
and that is where centuries later we got the phrase humble pie,
that thing that you're supposed to eat when you are owning up to your mistakes and one of these days if I can ever get a hold of the numbles of a deer,
I want to make a numble pie.
But yes while he was fictional these early accounts of the feasts of Robin Hood are not all that fanciful.
Now while the life of an outlaw did change greatly depending on the time we're talking about several centuries of history here,
there was a period where escaping to the forest was a life chosen by many who considered it better than facing Norman justice.
And seeing as that often meant trial by combat I'm kind of with him for not wanting to participate in such a judicial charade.
I mean if I am accused of murder how is killing someone else going to prove my innocence? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If anything I think it would just make me seem more guilty. <_<
Now Henry II reformed the judicial process and trial by combat began to fade away as it was replaced with trial by jury,
but the problem with that was that the accused had to agree to stick around for a few days or weeks or months
until a jury could be assembled and they could go on trial but that often meant having to go to jail and who could afford that?
See at the time jails were private institutions who charged you for the privilege of staying in jail.
Something that we're actually bringing back today...
but in medieval England few could afford the luxury of a weekend jail and
so opted to run to the forest and become an outlaw instead.
Thus a lot more forest dwelling outlaws and when you dwelt in the forest
to sustain yourself you either had to hunt or you had to steal from unsuspecting travelers,
and unlike Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to the poor it was often much easier to steal from the poor who couldn't afford any security.
Now a fair number of those relegated to the forest were not there because they had murdered someone
but rather because they had stolen something small, petty theft or perhaps poaching, an all too common offense.
See when William the Conqueror came a-conquering he declared a
large swath of land in the south of England known as New Forest to be a Royal Forest.
That is, it and everything in it belonged to him, to the King and should you be caught taking anything from it
it would be considered poaching and a swift punishment was to follow
In an 11th century poem about the life of William the Conqueror
it says "He established many deer preserves and he set up many laws concerning them such that whoever killed a heart or a hind
should be blinded. He forbade hunting of harts, and also of boars. He loved the wild deer as if he were their father."
Now blinding someone who shot one of your deer may seem a harsh punishment
but it was nothing compared to his son William Rufus who added mutilation and even death as punishments.
And you're probably wondering 'well why do people keep hunting in his forest? Just go somewhere else.
But that was a lot harder than it seems especially as time went on because there was a lot of Royal forest
and it could apply to any area, not just tree areas, wooded areas, but
to the Moors of Dartmoor and to large patches of open fields in Yorkshire,
and it tended to always be the land with the best hunting available.
And even if you had been hunting there for years, your family had been hunting there for centuries
the King could just up and declare it a Royal Forest one day and then hopefully you like being a vegetarian.
When King Henry II became king in 1154 he declared the whole County of Huntingtonshire a Royal forest
and so his own personal hunting ground.
I mean it is called Huntingtonshire so it kind of seems obvious but imagine you had been living there for centuries, or your family had,
and then one day your commute to hunting just got a lot further.
Or in some cases you just got kicked out.
"In the woodlands reserved for hunting, which [King William] called the New Forest, he had villages rooted out and people removed,
and made it a habitation for wild beasts."
Now the overzealous foresting of English kings was eventually curtailed around 1215
when King John, the same that Robin Hood had so often tussled with in later versions of the tale,
was forced to sign a charter [the Unknown Charter] that stated that all the land afforested by him, his brother Richard I, and his father Henry II
had to be deforested and back then deforestation was actually a good thing as long as you weren't the king.
So these types of outlaws, the ones who were just scraping by in the woods would very likely have eaten similarly to the way that Robin Hood did.
Maybe a cask of ale or wine every once in a while that you stole off the back of a monk but overall pretty simple
but in Medieval England there was another caliber of outlaw. These were not men in tights
but men in armor,
organized crime gangs from England's best families like the infamous Folville Gang.
This was a group operating in Leicestershire in the early 14th century led by Eustace Folville,
the second son of Sir John Folville, a respected member of the gentry.
See Sir John had seven sons but only the eldest was able to inherit anything so
the other six sons decided that a career of murder and kidnapping, and extortion sounded a lot better than joining the Church.
Though one of the sons Richard Folville actually did join the Church but that didn't stop him from participating
in the 1326 murder of Roger de Beler, Baron of the Exchequer.
The Folville Gang was about 50 men strong and for years they terrorized all of Leicestershire
but they were not afraid of becoming outlaws in the same way that most people were
because they didn't have to go skulk away into the forest because they came from money.
So they could afford to leave the country for a while or be taken in by one of their wealthy friends
like the nobleman in charge of Rockingham Castle and ironically in charge of enforcing the King's laws in the Royal Forest fare.
But instead of hanging the Folville's as he should have it was reported that
"sometimes twenty armed men, sometimes thirty, come to de Vere at the castle and they leave at dawn or in the night.
He shuts the gate facing the town, and they can leave secretly by a postern.
Those bringing victuals are not allowed to enter lest they should come to know those armed men."
Now Richard Folville, the one who joined the clergy, ended up becoming the leader of the gang for a while
and he was pretty much just as ruthless as his brother Eustace. One account said
he " was a wild and daring man, and prone to acts of violence."
He and several of his men kidnapped a royal judge, on Christmas day of all days,
and stole everything that he had and then ransomed him back to his family for what would basically be about a half million dollars today.
But in 1340 while Richard was at his church in Teigh where he was rector
the law finally caught up to him and following a small battle Richard was dragged from the building
into the churchyard and summarily beheaded.
But he was the only one. None of the other brothers ever had to to answer for their crimes. In fact
they were all pardoned and Eustace perhaps the worst of them all was knighted by the King when he went to France to go fight for him.
And so later he was remembered as a hero of the people which he was absolutely not.
Eustace Folville and his entire gang were nothing but a bunch of murderous thugs,
and yet they are likely one of the inspirations for Robin Hood and his band of merry men.
There was even this idea that grew up around the Folville legend called Folville's Law which
basically said that everything bad, everything illegal that the Folville's did they did in pursuit of the greater good for the common man,
and that is sort of echoed in the 1521 line about Robin Hood
that "he permitted no harm to women, nor seize the goods of the poor, but helped them generously with what he took from abbots."
One of the things that Robin Hood perhaps took from the abbots was a little box of pepper and ginger,
to liven up his venison pasties.
So once your pasties are baked take them out of the oven and then let them cool for about 15 minutes and then they're ready to serve,
and here we are the venison pasties of Robin Hood.
Now before I try these I wanted to thank Kristn Noone who I met last summer at a wine tasting of all places,
and she actually gave me the idea to do this video and ended up sending me
some wonderful research so thank you so much Kristin.
Now let's give this a shot. It is still quite warm but it has cooled off enough.
Smells really good. Let's go!
[CHOMP]
That's a big bite.
My mom used to always scold me for taking to big a bite and clearly I have not changed. Anyway!
The pastry, it is not flaky like some modern cornish pasty, pastries.
It's definitely heartier and it's because of the flour that we used. I think a regular white flour would probably taste a little bit better
but it's not bad. It just is is more utilitarian than anything else.
I'm going to just taste some of the meat because it is quite gamey
but it's also quite tender which is kind of surprising.
And the spice isn't overwhelming but it's there. The pepper definitely stands out more than than the ginger but I use more pepper because I kind of wanted that.
They don't give quantities of what to- how much to use of each spice so you can really make it your own
but they turned out really, really well. They're just wonderfully filled.
Let me open this one up crack this one open so you can kind of see inside.
It's just stuffed with the meat and it didn't dry out.
Very nice. :)
Now even though it's not dry you might be in the mood for some sort of sauce to go with this
and the 14th century French cookbook actually gives us a sauce to go with it.
"Fresh venison is not basted and is always eaten with a cameline sauce."
That is a cinnamon based sauce and I actually made that sauce to go with boar in a video on the Templar Knights
so I'll put that down here,
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.