Medieval Apple Tarts and the Sweet End of a Feast

A recipe two lines long

The recipe is short enough to quote whole. "Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reysons and Perys and wan they are wel ybrayed colourd wyth Safroun wel and do yt in a cofyn and do yt forth to bake wel." In modern English: take good apples, good spices, figs, raisins and pears; when they are well pounded, color the mixture well with saffron, put it in a pastry case and bake it well.

It comes from a cookery manuscript that the antiquarian Samuel Pegge printed together with The Forme of Cury, the roll compiled about 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II. A note at the end of one part of the manuscript gives the year 1381, and Pegge judged the collection to be of the same period as the royal roll and made chiefly for great tables. By 1420 the recipe was already a generation old.

Notice what is missing. There is no sugar, since the sweetness comes from the pears and dried fruit, and there are no quantities or timings. Like most recipes of its day it is a reminder for a trained cook, not a lesson for a beginner. The word "ybrayed" means pounded in a mortar, so the filling was a spiced fruit paste, tinted gold with saffron, with no neat slices in sight.

What a pastry coffin was

The "cofyn" is nothing grim. The word meant a pastry case, and Pegge's notes gloss coffins as "pies without lids," or pies raised without their lids. The recipes give them real depth. A custard tart called daryols goes into a coffin two inches deep, and a Lenten tart asks for one an inch deep.

Recipes also mention baking in a "trape," which Pegge explains as a pan or dish. A cook could shape a free-standing case or line a dish with paste, fill it, and send the tart "forth to bake."

Apples elsewhere in the royal cookbook

The tart was one of several apple dishes. Appulmoy, or appulmos, was a thick apple pottage: apples boiled and strained, then cooked with almond milk, honey, rice flour, saffron and spices until it stood firm. The 1381 manuscript gives a version for meat days with beef broth and one for fish days with olive oil.

Apples were also fried. One recipe parboils apples with parsnips, dips them in a batter of flour, eggs, ale, saffron and salt, fries them in oil or fat and serves them with almond milk. Pears had their own showpiece, "peeres in confyt": pared pears simmered in red wine, colored with mulberries, and finished in a syrup of Greek wine or vernage with sugar and ginger.

Sweet and savory were not kept apart as they are today. The Lenten tart mentioned above grinds figs, raisins, apples and pears with wine and sugar, then adds cooked salmon, cod or haddock before the mixture goes into its coffin under a layer of prunes and dates.

Keeping fruit through the winter

That Lenten tart is a small clue in itself. Lent falls at the end of winter, and a recipe that expects apples and pears then assumes a household had fruit in store.

The best keepers were warden pears. A note published by New College, Oxford, describes them as exceptionally hard pears that could only be eaten after long cooking, whose firmness allowed them to be stored through the winter. The name may come from an Anglo-Norman word meaning "to keep." Wardens were roasted and baked in pies, and were famously grown by the Cistercian monks of Warden Abbey in Bedfordshire. A story that their keeping qualities took them to Agincourt as army rations is told with a cautious "supposedly," and should be treated as tradition.

How a feast ended: wafers, spiced wine and the void

A fruit tart was not necessarily the last thing to reach the table. The formal finish of a grand meal was lighter, and it had its own ceremony.

First came wafers and hippocras, a spiced and sweetened wine. A set of instructions that Pegge printed with The Forme of Cury ends with the order to "serve forthe waffers and Ypocrasse," and he adds that hippocras was brought in at Christmas at the close of dinner at a Cambridge college within living memory of his own day. Wafers were thin and crisp, cooked between a pair of irons. Dr. Christopher Monk, who writes the Modern Medieval Cuisine glossary, notes "1 pair of oblée irons" in the Durham Abbey accounts for 1346 and a York "obletmaker," or wafer maker, recorded in 1427.

Then came the void, or voidee. According to the Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, the word comes from the French for "cleared," and the medieval English voidee was a repast of hippocras, plain spices and dry sweetmeats meant to soothe the digestion. It was typically served after dinner, in a separate space, once the great hall had been cleared of people, and could also be offered to overnight guests before bed.

From tart to cobbler

Cobbler belongs to a later chapter of the same story. The Foods of England project notes that the name seems to be of American origin and gives as its earliest American reference John Russell Bartlett's 1859 glossary of words peculiar to the United States, which describes a form of pie made with bread-dough pastry. Cobbler is a later relative of the old fruit pie, not a medieval dish.

The family likeness is easy to taste all the same. The apple cobbler that closes the St. Nicholas Day Feast at Yuletide Medieval Festival sets warm spiced apples under a baked crust, which is the idea a cook of 1381 put in a coffin and sent forth to bake.

Questions