Neat-Tongue Mince Pie Addendum II: Things Learned In and Around Pastry Failures

In searching for a period recipe to adapt for my neat-tongue mince pie, I had mentioned a couple days ago going through a few different works from the seventeenth and eighteenth century. One of the things I was looking for was what, if any, paste or pastry they specified, as I wanted to make that element historically authentic, if I could. 

The earliest was from the 1678 Rare and Excellent Receipts. Experienc'd, and Taught by Mrs. Mary Tillinghast. She does give advice as to what meat is best but merely then says “fill your Pie.” The Whole Duty of a Woman from 1700 is similar: the pie itself is merely implied. There is no mention of paste and the last line is “So close it up and bake in a gentle oven.” 

The edition of The Accomplish'd Ladies Delight from 1689 offers a clue. It reads: “then being all well mixt together, put it into a Coffin, or many coffins, and so bake them.” As I mentioned, a coffin is a raised pastry case; these would often hold a whole animal in Early Modern banquets. 

Shakespeare, a few years before the recipes in question, uses word play and demonstrates that a coffin would connect with raised (or reared) pastry in a period audience’s mind. In the gory tragedy Titus Andronicus, the (anti)- hero takes revenge for his slain and abused children by killing the two sons of the woman responsible. He then makes a pie of them and feeds it to her. Before their demise, he says to the two men: 

Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,

And with your blood and it I'll make a paste, 

And of the paste a coffin I will rear, 

And make two pasties of your shameful heads, 

And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, 

Like to the earth swallow her own increase. 

The recipe calling for a coffin in making a mince pie would probably mean it was recommending hand-raised hot-water pastry. I have wanted to try this for a while. A number of years ago, The Great British Bake-off (or The Great British Baking Show) did a technical challenge where the contestants had to make Paul Hollywood’s Hand-Raised Chicken and Bacon Pie. The first link below shows video of the introduction to the challenge and the second link is Hollywood’s recipe with a demonstration of raised pastry at the bottom. 

https://www.pbs.org/video/hand-raised-pie-nqdlg9/  

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/hand-raised_chicken_and_12433  

I hope to have some time to do another period Christmas recipe with this type of pastry in the coming days. But that all being said, I did not use it for my mince pie. 

The final recipe I looked at for a neat-tongue mince pie - the one I decided to follow fairly closely - was quite clear about what pastry to use and how to use it. Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper says to “make a rich puff paste” and she mentions putting things in a pot or pan. I did some research to see whether puff paste meant something similar as it does today and it did, so the pie is meant to be made with puff pastry in some kind of vessel, as opposed to being free-standing.

There was a wealth of puff pastry recipes in a book from 1696 called The Family-dictionary; Or, Household Companion by William Salmon, Professor of Physic. 

From the four above you can see, there is a rich dough to which more butter is added, often in stages, and then rolled multiple times.  Similar in that method was a recipe that I found in Raffald’s book. Wanting to maintain consistency with period instructions, I decided to go with that one, which she called "To make a cold Paste for dish Pies."

Once I had committed to this and got through the early, straight forward, parts of the recipe – flour, eggs, water - I realized that there was ambiguity. She tells you to rub a half pound of butter into the flour and then add, presumably, more butter in slices after you have rolled it out. She does not say how much more butter, but going from modern puff pastry recipes the ratio of flour to butter is relatively equivalent. This meant I was to add another half-pound of butter, which I attempted to do in three stages as per the recipe. I followed her instructions in that I rolled it up tight and rolled it out again a total of three times. 

However due to my ignorance of pastry, or the recipe itself, this did not create layers but made great streaks of just butter that made the pastry nearly impossible to work with. I cheated a bit by chilling the pastry in between each rolling, but this helped very little. I did manage to fashion a bottom and a top and get it in the oven. Now when I say that this was a failure, I add the caveat that it did taste really good. This is not surprising given how much butter was added. The failure came in the amount of liquid produced and the absence of any real pastry structure as you can see. Still, I made period puff pastry and have something delicious and certainly edible. 

Tomorrow I will do a little coda on the importance and sometimes infamy of mince pies before moving on to other things Christmas.