Tartes de Chare: Playing with 15th-Century pork pie

Another recipe for the previously-mentioned SCA event lunch. I combined parts of two 15th-Century English recipes that appear in the same text, starting with the simpler of two filling preparations and adding a little fruit for color and flavor.

The part that may be a bit of a stretch from the original recipe is using roasted ham as the meat filling. In the interests of making this a very economical lunch so we can charge each diner only $5 for a full meal including beverages and sweets, I'm using a meat that we all know will be on sale right around Easter time, which is near the date of the event. Meats were preserved by salting and curing before 1600, but I have not done sufficient research on the topic to be able to claim with confidence that 21st-Century America's familiar Easter ham was also known to medieval Europeans.

The original recipes were taken from A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke, a collection of English recipes compiled and left largely unaltered by John L. Anderson. The first Tartes de Chare recipe calls for a filling of ground fresh pork, raw eggs, fried pine nuts and currants, pepper, ginger powder, cinnamon, sugar, saffron, salt, dates, prunes, and small birds browned in grease. These are put into a large "cofynne," a double-crust pie dough that stands by itself around the filling without a pie pan, and baked. The second recipe, "Tartes de Chare Another Manere," also available on the website Gode Cookery, is also baked in a "cofynne" and has a filling of broiled pork that is ground and mixed with egg yolk, pepper, ginger and honey. Neither recipe gives any indication of amounts of any ingredient or baking time or the ingredients for the pie crusts.

I had a little help with the "cofynne" recipe from A Temperance of Cooks, a website that gives modern measurements for early recipes. The one I chose is called "Good White Crust," which was adapted by ATOC from Gervase Markham's 1615 book The English Housewife. I divided the dough into two portions, one of about 2/3 to 3/4 of the dough for the bottom crust, the other 1/3 to 1/4 for the top crust.

Here is my recipe for the filling:

1 1/2 pounds roasted bone-in ham (not honey ham or precooked canned ham), minced (I don't have a meat grinder, so I minced and minced and minced)
3 eggs
3 oz prunes, chopped
2 oz raisins or currants
1/4 tsp ginger powder
2 Tbsp honey
freshly ground black pepper

Mix ham thoroughly with eggs. Sprinkle liberally with black pepper, add fruit and ginger and honey and mix. Roll out bottom crust and lay on baking sheet. Pile filling inside, press into shape and raise the crust up around the filling with straight sides. Lay on the top crust and crimp to seal. Cut an X in the top crust to let out steam. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until center of pie bubbles and crust browns, about 1 hour 10 minutes (I also gave it an additional 10 minutes with the oven off, which may not have been necessary). Cool on rack, wrap in dishtowel and refrigerate.

The pie is best served cold a day or two later because the pie slices so neatly and the fruit flavor is not overpowered by the ham. I served it with a sauce made from dry mustard, red wine vinegar and honey, which tasted great, but really cleared out the sinuses like horseradish. On leftovers, I tried a milder mixture of dijon mustard and honey, which I liked better. Mustard sauce, my tasters told me, is really essential to making the crust less dry and more appetizing.

If I ever baked a ham for Easter, I'd definitely bring out this recipe to take care of the leftovers. Most of the other ingredients are usually hanging around our house. For a dish with this many eggs and this much meat, I was pleasantly surprised that eating a piece for lunch the day after the tasting dinner didn't give my guts fits.