To paraphrase 'The Sound of Music''
how do you solve a problem like a medieval knight who won't stop killing people?
One answer is a tournament, and today we'll cook something that might
have been served to King Pellinore just before a joust, chewtes on flesshe day or meat pies.
So thank you to Porter Road for sponsoring this video as we make a Medieval meal to go,
this time on Tasting History.
So there are lots of recipes for these little pies and they're all a little bit different
so I'm actually going to be pulling from several Medieval ]recipes but the one that
I'm reading is from the "Liber core cocorum" from 1430 and I'm doing it because it's a poem.
"Take liver of pork and carve it small, for a pie be hewen hit shall,
and hence therewith do all in a pan, and fry it well as thou well can,
make a coffin as for a small pie, and that therein and yolks thereby of hard eggs boiled
and also thou take powder of ginger and salt to bake.
Carve it and fry it in greaseful good, well pinched served at last by the rode,
here endsour cookery, that I have spake, of pottage, hasteletes, and meat I bake,
and sauce thereto, without lying. Christ must our souls to heaven bring."
So a meat pie with pork and chicken,
though there are also recipes that call for veal or other types of beef,
some with fish that are meant to be eaten during Lent and others that are sweet pies with fruit
though the fruit would be cooked. For in the words of 'The Book of Kervynge" from 1500
"Beware of green salads and raw fruits for they will make your sovereign sick."
Well there is one recipe for salad from The Forme of Cury
so clearly not everyone took that to heart. Now like I said there are lots
of other recipes and several of them say that you can use any piece of pork
rather than this one which specifies pork liver, well I don't like pork liver so
I'm going to follow one of those other period recipes and
use just some other cuts of pork though even these cuts are a little odd.
They're interesting cuts like pork wings and pork neck that I got from our sponsor Porter Road.
Now I often do recipes here on the show that call for .
shall we say intimidating cuts of meat and they can
be really hard to find even at most butcher shops,
but Porter Road is an online butcher based in Tennessee that can supply both traditional cuts
like pork chops or chicken breast, but also those interesting cuts like merlot steak, or pork wings
and I love them because they work with local farmers who pasture raise their animals
and practice responsible animal husbandry which actually
affects the quality and the flavor of the meat,
and you can order individual cuts online or you can sign up for a subscription
and the meat arrives fresh direct to your door. In addition to the pork wings and the pork neck
I got some pork chops which I had for dinner just last night.
They were so tender and flavorful that other than a little bit of salt and some butter
they didn't need anything else to be absolutely the bee's knees,
or in this case the pork's chop, and since you're watching Tasting History
with Max Miller you get 15% off of your first order by clicking the link in the description
and you get free shipping on any orders over a $100.
Now that we know where our meat came from
let's figure out exactly how much we need for these chewtes on flesshe day.
One pound or 450 grams of pork. Like I said I'm using pork wings and pork neck but any
cut will do and that goes the same for the one half pound or 225 grams of chicken,
five hard-boiled egg yolks, one teaspoon ground ginger, and one and a half teaspoons of salt.
So cut up your pork and chicken and set them in a pan to fry.
You want to have it completely cooked through and that's going to depend on how small you
made your pieces but probably four to five minutes to make sure that everything is done.
Also you want the pieces to be rather small because
it's going to be easier to put them into your pie.
Then put the cooked meat in a bowl and mash your egg yolks and add them to the meat.
Then add the ginger and the salt and mix everything together.
Now when it comes to the pastry it's really up to you what you want to use.
There was no standard for something like this in Medieval England.
They used everything from very bland just water and flour. You weren't really supposed
to eat it. It was just a holder to kind of fancier pastries that would have had egg yolks and butter
or milk in them. Now they didn't have puff pastry but I'll tell you it actually works
really well for these so you can use that. What I'm going to be using is something
akin to a hot water crust pastry but frankly it's even easier to make.
You need 3 cups or 400 grams of flour, a half cup or 113 grams of butter,
2/3 cup or about 150 grams of lard, and 1/3 cup or 80 milliliters of boiling water.
So make a well in the center of the flour and add the lard and the butter,
then pour the boiling water over it. Then using a fork work the fat and flour together.
If it's not forming a dough then just add a little bit more water. Once it does form a
dough set it out on a lightly floured surface and use your fingers or the heel of your palm
to kind of smear the fat in through the dough until well incorporated.
Then let it rest for a while either in the refrigerator or you can just leave it out
for 20 or 30 minutes until it comes to room temperature.
At this point take small pieces and roll them into rounds and then set a bit of meat in the
center of the dough and fold it over to create a pie crimping the edges.
Depending on the size of pie that you're making it should make about 12. Now it comes to cooking them
and for this I'm going to have you join me over at camera 2.
So we don't have a-
we don't- I guess we don't have a camera 2. Oh and there's nobody else here so I'm just
talking to myself but that's okay because we need to talk..
It is important to stay humble. Remember Caesar thou art mortal and today I was reminded that
I art mortal.
The recipe that I tried to follow says to fry these and I tried to fry them.
I tried three different doughs, I had different types of fat at different temperatures. I've
fried things before and it's worked but today my kitchen was like no no,
you are going to fail at every attempt that you make and you just have to be okay with that.
So after some hours of frustration and despair I decided to bake them and that
is okay because in two other recipes from the two 15th century cookbooks
it does call for them to be baked but I did try to fry them so I failed and that's okay.
So while I encourage you to try to fry them if you want to bake them like I did
put on a nice egg wash and then pop them in an oven
at 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celcius
for about 20 minutes.
Now while those bake and you leave me a comment of support or more likely a
comment letting me know what I did wrong let's escape to Medieval Europe where the nobility
and the church were having just as much trouble taming their knights as I did taming these pies.
There's an old saying an idle mind is the devil's workshop,
well an idle knight would spend a lot of time in said workshop.
So it was important to keep them busy.
See early on in the Medieval period a knight's job was destruction
and in the 10th and 11th century especially in
that part of Europe that had been the Carolingian Empire
they took that job very seriously. There were constant private wars
being fought between minor lords and when there was a break in the fighting
these knights tended to practice on the peasantry and the Church. Easy targets I suppose.
So in an attempt to curb the rampant violence the Church introduced the Pax et Treuga Dei
or Peace and Truce of God. The peace of God was first proclaimed in 989 and it sought to protect
Church property and unarmed clerics.
A general agreement that "I will not infringe on
the Church in any way. I will not hurt a cleric or a monk if unarmed.
I will not steal an ox, cow, pig, sheep, goat, ass or a mare with a colt..."
Not much help for the little guy but at least the Bishop's cows were safe. However it was
expanded when Robert II of France agreed not to ransom servants or merchants or to root up fines.
Nor would he "burn a house down unless there was a knight inside....
I will not attack noble ladies traveling without husband nor their maids,
nor widows or nuns unless it is their fault.
From the beginning of Lent to the end of Easter
I will not attack an unarmed knight." Kind of implies that he had been doing these things.
Now the Church took that last part, not attacking a knight during Lent,
and expanded it into the Treuga Dei, or the Truce of God in 1027.
This put a lot more restraints on the timing of violence.
No violence at all during Lent or on Sundays or during pentecost
and at certain times battling could only take place Wednesday through Saturday, seems sensible.
Now between the Peace of God and the Truce of God you'd think that a lot of things got better
but you'd be wrong because while some people followed these these edicts most people did not.
It tended to be a case of what are you going to excommunicate all of us,
and the answer tended to be no. So the next ploy to curb violence in Western Europe was just to
move it a few thousand miles to the East.
It was called the First Crusade.
Now there were a lot of reasons for the Crusades and it's a far
more complicated topic than than we're going to talk about here
but one reason was to occupy the ever-fighting knights of Europe and it worked...
at least until they got back. But once they did get back there was a new way to control
their behavior called chivalry coming from the old French chevalier or horse soldiery.
Now what was chivalry exactly? Because it wasn't always the pious and virtuous ideal
set out by late Medieval and Victorian authors. Sometimes it was, or at least that was the goal,
but not always and one of my favorite Youtubers Shadowversity does an excellent video on the
intricacies and misconceptions of chivalry so I'll put a link to that in the description but
essentially it was a code of conduct but it wasn't always the same code of conduct for everyone.
See everyone had their own idea of what would make a knight chivalrous
under any given circumstance. An extreme example might be that archbishop Thomas
Beckett's idea of chivalry might be a knight's devotion to the Church.
A true Miles Christi or knight of Christ but Henry II's ideal was
that a knight should have 100% loyalty to their lord and so when he orders
a knight to go kill the Archbishop those two concepts are in conflict.
And that kind of conflict actually probably happened a lot but
it was a good way to control your knight.
So between the Peace of God, the Truce of God the Crusades and the ever-evolving code of chivalry
there was actually a lot less fighting at least in comparison with previous centuries
but when there is no fighting what's a knight to do?
For "that which ceases from use has prepared the way for its own retirement.
We knights are being kept from action like unskilled clodhoppers;
this long interval of sitting around, which prevents the practice of knightly exercise,
gives one kidney stones."
But the lords of Northern France and eventually of all Europe had an answer:
tournament.
"The recreation of a tournament is healthy and delightful,
and it is held among knights for good reason, since those who are fit to be
called to a tournament in time of peace will be all the more able to withstand enemies in war."
Though when these tournaments first started around the end of the 11th century they were brutal.
They were a far cry from the archery and blunt jousting tournaments of later centuries.
It was basically a mock battle on horseback called a melee and the idea was to knock your opponent
off of their horse but instead of a gentlemanly 'hear hear old chum,
better luck next time' as you help them to their feet
you would beat them mercilessly and then take their horse and armor to ransom back to them
later. Though even this was a corruption of the original intent according to the poet from the
12th century Henri de Laon "Tournaments were not originally held as a way of capturing horses,
but so as to learn who was manly in his conduct and to do great deeds of arms,
and so it would be known that he could wear a helmet despite the heat and lack of air within
as lightly as he would wear his cloth cap for the man who in such
a situation is soaked in his own blood and sweat.
This I call the high bath of honor.
Though honor seems a relative term because there are stories in those early tournaments of
one knight fleeing and going off to some village and then being pursued by his fellow knights
and that would usually end in a lot of like burning, pillaging and and that kind of thing so
you know you don't need to ransom stuff back when you can just take it from the peasants. But
Max didn't you just say that that was the point of the tournament, to stop that kind of behavior?
Yes, yes I did but it took quite a while to do that. It took some rules to be put in place
that turned the melee into more of a contest that had prizes that didn't include ransom.
Though not everyone liked that change. In a poem written to the young King Henry III in 1220
the author laments the bygone era of late 12th century tournaments.
"But nowadays high-ranking men have put chivalry back in fetters too;
errantry and tourneying have given way to formal contests.
But if God please the young King Henry will restore fun laughter and joy to the world."
But the fun, laughter and joy of unbridled violence was gone forever from the tournament
as they leaned into the sport and contest aspects of the event.
Though that's not to say that tournaments weren't still extremely taxing.
There's a wonderful letter from an earl to another earl basically asking for a timeout.
"An earl to an earl, greetings. An assembly
for the practice of knightly skills is refreshed by a modest suspension.
One should not cancel it but let it be interrupted for a brief time
for who can fight without a pause?"
And even as late as the 16th century as the
warrior knight was giving way to the gentleman knight of later centuries
and tournaments added blunted lances and collision barriers called tilts.
The events could still be incredibly dangerous even king Henry VIII during a jousting tournament
was horribly wounded. "The Duke's spear broke and the King's headpiece was full of splinters."
So even with the taming of medieval knights it was still a very brutal lifestyle.
I can assure you you wouldn't find me out there on the tournament grounds.
No I'd be over in the corner by the food stalls waiting for my pork chewtes to finish cooking.
So whether you fried or baked your chewtes
go ahead and let them cool and then they're ready to eat.
And here we are chewtes on flesshe day.
They smell great and I gotta say they have a wonderful color.
I'm glad I went with baking them...
even though I was forced basically into doing so. I'm still glad I did.
Let's get let's give this a shot.
So in that first bite I got a little bit of filling but pretty much all I got was was pastry,
and that's actually kind of apropo because
it typically especially in a case like this the pastry wasn't really meant to be eaten
you would kind of open it up and then eat the insides from there,
so it's kind of appropriate that all I got was pastry, and now I can indulge on the insides.
I mean obviously it looks like a pasty, like a cornish pasty which I need to do an episode on
and it kind of tastes like it too in a lot of ways.
What's interesting is kind of what the filling is. That ginger and some of the other
recipes have even more spices and interesting things like wine and ver juice added it's not
overpowering ginger but just ginger on pork and chicken with egg that is weird but it's good.
I'm definitely- I don't really-
I don't really get the egg.
In modern pork pies they often add hard-boiled egg and I just don't get why. I don't know.
I also wouldn't mind a bit of like gravy or some sort of sauce.
It's not dry it's just there is no there's not a lot holding it together.
It's just like pieces of meat. I don't exactly know what would-
what would do well with that maybe just dump the meat out into some gravy. Hm! :)
So whether you decide to fry or bake these just remember that
when you're in the kitchen if you mess up
it doesn't really matter, just it's supposed to be fun
and and I had fun making them, and I had fun doing this episode. So yeah!
So thank you again to Porter Road for sponsoring this video and make sure to follow me on Instagram
@tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I shall see thee next time on Tasting History.