Some Early English Pie Trivia With Which to Amaze Your Friends

I set out this evening to improvise a spinach, tomatoes and cheese pie. While the result tasted great, it was much too moist to say that it was a successful dish. Maybe will I try it again and write about what hopefully will be a better attempt at a later date.  That being said, the experience gave me the idea to write about good old English pie.

Something baked in a crust has been a meal in the British Isles for a long time.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “pie” first shows up in the early 1300s.  At about the same time, church roles list people with the probably related surname of Pyeman.  Geoffrey Chaucer, writing at the end of that century, includes a cook among the pilgrims whose stories make up his Canterbury Tales.  Of the character he writes:

             A Cook they hadde with hem for the nones,

To boille the chiknes with the marybones,

And poudre-marchant tart, and galyngale.

Wel koude he knowe a draughte of London ale;

He koude rooste, and sethe, and broille, and frye,

Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye.

Or in more modern terms:

A cook they had with them, just for the nonce [purpose,]

To boil the chickens with the marrow-bones,

And flavour tartly and with galingale [a spice like ginger.]

Well could he tell a draught of London ale.

And he could roast and seethe [boil] and broil and fry,

And make a good thick soup, and bake a pie.

Further research shows that the main filling of these pies was usually savoury, rather than the fruit than is most common in current North American versions of the pastry.  But that does not mean that they weren’t sweet. A recipe for a chicken pie by Thomas Dawson can be found his 1587 book The Good Huswifes Jewell Wherein is to be Found Most Excellent And Rare Devises For Conceits In Cookerie.  He lists it under the heading “Another bakemeate for Chickens:”

First season your Chickens with sugar, cinnamon and ginger, and so lay them in your pie, then put in upon them Gooseberries, or grapes, or Barberries, then put in some sweet butter, and close them up, and when they be almost baked, then put in a Cawdle [a thin sauce] made with hard eggs and white wine, and serve it.

While the spice profile of this dish is similar to a modern apple pie, pies filled just with fruit were only beginning to be found in print when Thomas Dawson wrote.  The Oxford Dictionary has the words “apple pie” and “plum pie” being first written in 1589. In 1614, Nicolas Breton wrote a school boy’s poem that shows the apple variety of the dish had become well-known and valued. 

I would I were an Innocent, a fool,
That can do nothing else, but laugh or cry:
And eat fat-meat, and never go to school;
And be in love, but with an Apple-pie.

And with expressions of hopes and dreams that are still valid almost four hundred years after their writing, so ends a cursory treatment of early English pie.