Brie Tart
Ingredients
Eggs
Brie
Ground Ginger
Salt
Flour
Butter
Water
The original recipe below is from the mid-fourteenth century and it is part of various English culinary recipes translated by Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler(1). This original recipe was reprinted in Pleyn Delit(2).
Take a crust ynche depe in a trap. Take 3olkes of ayren rawe & chese ruayn & medle it & the 3olkes togyder. Do thereto powdour gynger, sugur, safroun, and salt. Do it in a trap; bake it & serve it forth.
This translated recipe was then redacted by the authors of Pleyn Delit to create the following recipe(3):
Brie Tart
Pastry for one open tart or 2 dozen very small tarts
6 egg yolks or 3 whole eggs
5 oz. soft cheese, preferably Brie (rind pared off)
1/4 tsp each ground ginger, salt
optional: 1/4 cup sugar (if to be served as dessert); scant pinch
saffron
Mix cheese, eggs, and seasonings in a blender or processor; if you must do it by hand, add beaten eggs to well-mashed cheese. Continue beating/blending until light and smooth. Bake in tart shell or shells in a 375 degree oven 15-20 minutes, only until lightly browned. Do not overfill the shells: about half-full is enough, as the mixture will puff during baking. This puffy effect may fall a bit when the tart is taken from the oven, but there should still be a slightly rounded look to the top.
The recipe calls for pastry dough but period recipes for pastry dough are as common as period recipes for bread dough. In other words, they are exceedingly rare. Pastry dough was just one of those things that a cook knew how to make and they made it to their own preferences. For the pastry dough I used a variation on a modern recipe from Take A Thousand Eggs or More(4) that uses common period ingredients.
Flaky Pastry
2 cups sifted flour
1/2 cup cold butter
6 tablespoons cold water
1/2 teaspoon salt
Sift together the flour and salt. Work the butter into the sifted flour with a fork or pastry blender. It is well mixed when it looks like bread crumbs. If it starts to get sticky, put the bowl and its contents in the refrigerator for five minutes until they are cold again. When it is well mixed, add the water, a little at a time, into the flour mixture. When the mixture forms a slightly crumbly ball, it has enough water. Divide in half. Roll half the dough out on a floured surface to 1/4 inch thickness to form a circle. Do the same with the other half. Follow the instructions in the Brie Tart recipe for baking. Makes two 9-inch pieshells.
The tart recipe calls for a soft cheese, preferably Brie. I used Brie in this dish as it is a period cheese, first mentioned in France in the twelfth century(5).
I chose not to add the optional sugar and saffron. The dish, when three whole eggs are used, comes out yellow enough from the yolks that the saffron is unnecessary.
FOOTNOTES
1. Hieatt, Constance B. Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks. Toronto, Canada. University of Toronto Press. Second Edition, 2000. p. 164.
2. Hieatt. Recipe 1.
3. Hieatt. Recipe 1.
4. Renfrow, Cindy. Take A Thousand Eggs Or More. United States of America. Second Edition, 1998. p. 196.
5. Renfrow. p. 42.
REFERENCES
Take A Thousand Eggs or More, by Cindy Renfrow, United States of America, Second Edition, 1998.
Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, by Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler, Toronto, Canada, University of Toronto Press, Second Edition, 2000.