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14

Pear of pies

1379

AUTHOR: Guillaume Tirel, aka Taillevent,

FROM: Le Viandier (The Food Provider)

Put upright in paste and fill the hollow with sugar; for three big pears about a quarter of a pound of sugar, well covered and glazed with eggs and saffron then cook them.

As the centuries march by, one needs to rely less on glimpses of cave paintings, random asides in poems, dinner-party recollections or fourteenth-century Swedish surnames to analyse the evolution of cooking. Yet when you do land on a seminal recipe, one that transforms things and pushes you forward to a new enlightened era, it’s not all plain sailing.

While Taillevent’s recipes are coherent, he makes considerable assumptions about the culinary abilities of his readers as he gives few quantities and no cooking times. But this didn’t dent his popularity. Although published in the latter part of the fourteenth century, his Le Viandier remained in print – going through fourteen editions – for almost 300 years. The recipe for pear pie that it contains is one of the earliest written recipes for pastry and is extremely sophisticated because not only does the pie hold fruit, it’s sweet and you can eat the crust.

But first a word on Taillevent, the pen-name of Frenchman Guillaume Tirel. His story is a classic culinary tale of someone starting at the bottom and rising to the top of the food tree. Many a great chef today started peeling veg and rose to run an empire, but while Taillevent didn’t run his own empire, he did cook for a king.

His first job, aged fourteen, was turning the great roasting spit in the kitchen of Jeanne de Bourbon, Queen of France and consort to King Charles V. The work would have been tough beyond belief for anyone, let along a young boy: hours of heaving the heavy metal handle while standing just feet away from a roaring fire. He would have finished the day stinking of smoke and meat fat. but it didn’t put him off. Instead, he rose through the ranks, gaining literacy as he went, and as he became more and more skilled, he caught the eye, as well as the taste buds, of the French king.

Charles V, known as Charles the Wise for his sound pragmatism, good governance and learning – one key legacy was the vast library he built – appointed Taillevent as his master cook. This was an important role, especially as the king suffered from gout and had an abscess on his left arm that might have resulted from poisoning. So skilled did Taillevent prove to be as a cook, however, that the king encouraged him to write down a collection of recipes – no doubt both his own and those he had collected from others.

The first known French cookbook, it includes numerous recipes for soups, ragouts, roasts – from piglets to cormorants (you cook them, he says, like heron, which in turn you cook like swan or peacock, which you should prepare like stork – yes, it’s one of those books). There are dishes for invalids, fish dishes, sauces, tips and ideas for cooking with wine, as well as a chapter on ‘desserts and other things’, the former including a very tasty milk tart, the latter, hedgehog.

Yet among all these dishes it’s the pear tart that stands out because it was so ahead of its time. The earliest example of a recipe for pastry in England didn’t emerge until 1545 when A Proper New Booke on Cokery came out in London. And even this is more of an aide-memoire to the cook than a fully fledged recipe book, as it lacks any helpful detail.

No doubt medieval cooks had been preparing pies for some time before Taillevent wrote this recipe, but his was a considerable development. His pear pie has a crust which you eat. Once cooked you cut through it, the pears and their juices oozing out onto the plate. You then mop up the sweet saffron juice with the pastry. But what’s so revolutionary about this, you may be wondering. One always eats the pastry from a pie – it’s often the best bit. Back in those days, however, this was not the case. Pie crust was not intended to be eaten; it was there to cook the contents in.

And pretty well everything was cooked in this way. As pie historian Jane Clarkson is keen on telling people: ‘Once upon a time everything baked in an oven that was not bread was pie.’ Even bread wasn’t always baked in an oven, but would have been cooked on a hearthstone or grill, and meat roasted on a spit. An oven, or kiln, was originally just used for firing pottery until it then occurred to someone that maybe the kiln could be used to cook food in. It’s a bit like how the Aga was originally just used for drying clothes and for dogs to sleep next to, then someone experimented by putting something in one of the ovens.

As for using the kiln to cook meat, these were days before roasting tins and chicken bricks. Some wrapped their food in leaves, others used a clay pot. Then a bright spark tried wrapping dough around the meat, which not only kept the juices in, but also worked as a container to both transport the meat and preserve it for a short time. It’s strange to think that the crust of a pie – the eye-catching casing – was never supposed to be edible. A bit like arriving at a hotel, unpacking and then trying to wear your suitcase – you weren’t supposed to do it. But someone did (eat the pie crust, that is, not try on the suitcase) and over time, dough, with the judicious addition of fat, became pastry.

Medieval recipes refer to pastry as a ‘coffin’ – that is, a box – as in the opening lines of this recipe from sixteenth-century Italy: ‘Make the coffin of a great pie or pastry, in the bottom make a hole as big as your fist …’ The title of the recipe, incidentally, is ‘To Make Pies That the Birds May Be Alive in Them and Fly Out When It is Cut Up’.

Taillevent’s pear pie doesn’t have four-and-twenty, or indeed any, live birds in it – Charles V doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would have appreciated that sort of entertainment. But the ingredients were expensive. Saffron was rare, as was sugar, so this was possibly a dish for a banquet. It might have made a nice pudding after the hedgehog, which, if you’re interested, Taillevent chops up finely and mixes with raisins, cheese and herbs and then stuffs into a lamb’s stomach and secures with a wooden skewer before cooking. He doesn’t say how, of course, but I’d suggest over hot coals.

Private collection

Taillevent’s Le Viandier remained in print for nearly 300 years and an engraving of his tomb is depicted in the 1892 edition of the book.