Playing with 15th-Century pork pie again

Not only are pork pie recipes available in the Harleian manuscripts from 15th century England, there is also a pork pie recipe in the 14th-century collection called Forme of Cury. The last time I tried to recreate a pork-and-fruit pie and described it in this blog, I was going with a 15th-Century source, but the recipe I used most recently from the prior century isn't much different. It's still ground/minced pork inside a crust with fruit and spices, although this one also includes some fowl, as did the first Tarte de Chare recipe I found.

This latest experiment with pork-and-fruit pie was a big hit at the local Society for Creative Anachronism shire's holiday party potluck, where a few of us took the challenge I'd posed to bring pre-1600 food to the party.

Here's the recipe I worked from this time (with special characters replaced with "th" where they appear):
Tartee
Take pork ysode. hewe it and bray it. do thereto ayrenn. Raisouns sugur and powdour of gyngur. powdour douce and smale briddes theramong and white grece, take prunes, safroun & salt, and make a crust in a trape & do ther Fars therin. &bake it wel & serue it forth. 

That is, take cooked/boiled pork and grind it, mix in eggs, raisins, sugar and powdered ginger, powder douce (sweet powder, a spice mixture). Add small birds and white grease (fresh fat, not drippings). Take prunes, saffron and salt. Make a crust in a trap (a pie dish) and put the farce (meat mixture) in it. Bake it well and serve it forth.

I departed from the original recipe's instruction to grind previously cooked pork and used fresh ground pork, easily available these days from the butcher shop. I also decided to do a double-crust pie that would stand on its own instead of putting a single-crust pie in a pie plate, because I wanted people at the potluck to be able to easily eat pieces of pie with their hands. As it turns out, the fresh pork may have been an unwise choice because the pie's juices steadily bubbled over through my vent holes in the crust and created quite a mess on my baking sheet. Cooked pork may have been more well-behaved and stayed in its crust.

I can only hope that entire small birds would have baked up to a safe temperature when mixed in with the rest of the meat. I didn't have the time the day I was baking to go looking for quail or doves, so I used 1.5 to 2 pounds chicken thighs, which for the convenience of my potluckers I deboned before cooking. And to be sure I'd get fully cooked fowl, I fried the chicken pieces in oil until browned before adding them on top of the pork mixture in my pie.

My recipe for the rest of the pork-and-fruit mixture:
1 pound ground pork
2 eggs
3 oz prunes, chopped
2 oz currants
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/2 to 3/4 tsp salt
2 whole cloves, crushed to powder
dash cinnamon and nutmeg
pinch saffron, crushed
2 tsp sugar

Once again, I used the "good white crust" recipe from A Temperance of Cooks that was their version of Gervase Markham's crust described in The English Housewife, a manual from 1615. It is sturdy, but just fatty enough to be a little flaky. The flavor is appealing, especially when the pie is still warm, and it bakes to a nice golden color at 375 degrees Fahrenheit without threatening to burn before the pie filling is done and bubbly in the center.

I should mention that I was instantly won over by the Project Gutenberg e-book version of Forme of Cury by Samuel Pegge, which I acquired for my iPod through iBooks, for the simple reason that it has every recipe listed individually in the table of contents, so I can just look for the title I want and go directly to that recipe without having to page through the entire book. A big win over the HTML version on the Project Gutenberg website because the recipes in the book are not organized alphabetically or even necessarily by course in the meal.