My first A&S entry came as a bit of an afterthought. You see, Endewearde's Tourney O' Love was yesterday and there was a call for desserts. Then someone suggested that desserts that were period could be documented and entered in the A&S competition. My original dessert idea had been to make cream puff swans to go with the romance angle of this very fun tournament and that made me wonder, are creampuff swans period? It turns out, with a couple of very small changes to the recipe, they are. Here, in all it's glory, is my documentation for my A&S entry at Tourney O' Love titled A Bevy of Swans Pluming Their Feathers For Aphrodite: A case for the elusive, yet tasty, period creampuff swan.
Entrant: Christiana Crane
Category: Food
Specific art form: Soteltie
Entry Contents: Six creampuff swans on a platter, plus more in reserve for dessert.
Background
When the call went out for desserts for the Tourney o’ Love, I was more than happy to lend a hand. Then, it was suggested that entries could also be submitted to the A&S exhibit. My mind immediately went to the soteltie. As I considered options for the dessert, I started thinking about swans. Swans have long been associated with grace and elegance and love. The Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, is often depicted with swans. My original thoughts were of a dessert made from crisp merengue, but in researching the idea, I stumbled across a modern recipe for cremepuff swans. It seemed like the exact sort of thing that would have delighted the medieval epicurean, and I began to wonder, could there have been such a thing as a period creampuff swan?
Description
Sotelties or Subtleties are a well documented part of medieval feasting. Early sotelties were simple, yet colorful and exotically spiced, filler dishes between courses. By the 14th century, the soteltie had evolved into much more elaborate presentations, often putting the cooked animal into a lifelike pose, or redressing an animal, notably birds, in their original plumage. English cooks were particularly fond of playing with pastry, using it to form all manner of objects for the delight of their diners. (1)
The Pastry: The invention of Choux pastry is attributed to Pantarelli, the pastry chef of Catherine d’Medici, in 1540. Pantarelli used the dough to make small cakes in the shape of women’s breasts, called Popelins.(2) The dough was originally used to create a cake, called Pâte à Panterell, but chefs soon found other uses for the versatile dough.
Head chef to Pope Pious IV, Bartolomeo Scappi published a series of seven cookbooks in 1570, which contained over a thousand recipes. The fourth book, Quarto Libro, Dellimbandire Le Vivande is a collection of menus for each month of the year. Among the menus for October, he mentions works of “empty pastry”. His fifth book, Quinto Libro, Libro Delle Paste, contained numerous recipes for pies, tarts, brioche, and fritters, but none specifically called “empty pastry”. In spite of this, there are recipes which very closely resemble our modern choux pastry that he specifically notes can be baked instead of fried (see Preparations and Deviations below).
The historical base for the swan pastry comes from the 1584 cookbook, The Book of Cookrye:
To to make Bennets. Put butter and water over the fier in a faire pain, and when it boyleth put therto fine Flower and Salte, and so let them boyle, but stir them well for brenning, and when it is wel thick, put it into an earthen pan, then break Egs into it and boyle them so togither, than boyle a good quantitye of Butter clarified over the fire, and with a spoone put in your other stuffe and so frye them till they be browne, and that doone, serve them foorth with Sugar on them. (3)
The Custard: Both savory and sweet custards have a long and well documented culinary history. Most recipes with custard were used to make pies or quiches, but there is a recipe for a non-baked custard in Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks by Thomas Allen, called “Creme Boylede”.(4)
Take creme or mylke, and brede of paynemayn, or ellys of tendre brede, and breke it on the creme, or elles in the mylke, an set it on the fyre tyl it be warme hot; and thorw a straynour throwe it, and put it into a fayre potte, an sette it on the fyre, an stere euermore: an whan it is almost y-boylyd, take fayre yolkes of eyron, an draw hem thorw a straynowr and caste hem ther-to, and let hem stonde ouer the fyre tyl it boyle almost, an till it be skylfully thikke; than caste a ladel-ful, or more or lasse, of boter ther-to, an a good quantite of whyte sugre, and a litel salt, an than dresse it on a dysshe in maner of mortrewys.
The ingredients and methods to create this pudding-like custard are not dissimilar to modern pastry cream.
Preparations and Deviations
Exact quantities of ingredients are not given in the above recipe for the bennets recipe, so a modern recipe containing the same ingredients and methods was used for correct proportions.
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup water
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
Preheat the oven to 425º. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.
In a large saucepan, bring butter, water, and salt to a boil over medium-high heat. Remove pan from the heat and add the flour all at once. Stir quickly until all the flour is incorporated, about a minute. Return to the heat and cook, stirring constantly, for another minute or two.
Transfer the dough to the bowl. Either by hand or with a mixer beat at medium speed for 1 minute to cool the dough down a little.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition; beat until the dough loses its “slimy” look, and each egg is incorporated. The dough should be thick, too thick to be a batter, but too thin to be a kneedable dough.
Pipe into small balls (or in my case, the bodies and necks of swans) and Bake 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 375º and bake until puffed up and light golden brown, about 25 minutes more.
Let cool on the baking sheet.
Liberties were also taken with the cooking method based on alternative methods recommended by Scappi. While doughs of this nature are often fried, he mentions in a couple of recipes that the dough can be baked, especially if forming shapes. His recipe is as follows:
To make various types of fritters, and first to make Venetian fritters. Put to boil six pounds of goats milk, in a tin lined casserole, with six ounces of fresh butter, four ounces of sugar, four ounces of rose water, a little saffron and enough salt. When it is boiling and starts to rise one adds to it two pounds of fine flower a little at a time, mixing constantly with a wooden spoon. Mix until it becomes firm, like bread dough, then empty it from this pan and put it into a marble mortar. And pestle it for a quarter of an hour then take it out and put it into a copper or ceramic bowl. Then mix it with a wooden stick or your hands until it is cool. Then have 24 fresh eggs and put them into the paste one at a time, mixing constantly with the wooden spoon or with your hands, until this pastry becomes liquid. When you have finished adding the eggs beat for another quarter of an hour, until it makes blisters (?). Then let it rest for a quarter of an hour, covered, in a warm place and then beat another time. Then have ready a frying pan with hot lard in it and take this mixture and put it over a knife, and with the mouth of a carafe, bathed in cold lard, or with a canon of white iron*4 cut the fritters and put them into the lard. Give them a gentle heat and several times move the pan so that the fritters turn in the lard, without touching them. And when the fritters begin to be cooked they will wrinkle, because by nature they expand and become like the skin of medlars, and many times they turn by themselves, and one can see that they have taken enough color. And serve them hot with fine sugar above. With this pastry one can make various works with the syringe but you want to make the dough a little firmer than that for fritters for it to be good with the syringe, let them cook in an oven which is not too hot for half an hour and serve them with fine sugar on top. (5)
I chose instead to use the bennet recipe over Scappi because of the quantities of ingredients that Scappi suggests. Six pounds of goat milk, two pounds of flour and two dozen eggs are a lot of ingredients for a first time experiment, and as such, I opted for the similar recipe. When spring comes and I have access to goats milk, I will try scaling back this recipe and see how it comes out.
The custard recipe used was a modern equivalent of the 15th century Creme Boylede recipe, found in Cariadoc’s Miscellany, a modern translation of Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks by David Friedman and Elizabeth Cook.
5-10 slices torn-up white bread
1 quart light cream
8 lightly beaten egg yolks
6 T melted butter
1/2 c sugar
1 t salt
Soak bread in cream. Heat until hot to the touch but not boiling. Pass through a coarse sieve or mash thoroughly. Heat again, stirring constantly. When almost boiling, stir in egg yolks. Keep heating, stirring, not boiling, until it thickens. Stir in butter, sugar, salt. Serve in bowls.
Instead of serving them the custard in bowls, it is, of course, served in the pastry. In addition, I substituted the white bread for very fine bread crumbs, which were what I had on hand at the time.
To assemble the swans, I used a sharp serrated knife and sliced off the top third of the pastry. This top was then cut in half, so that each side formed a “wing”. The bottom of the pastry was then filled with the custard and the “head and neck” were inserted into the custard and the “wings” were arranged on the back.
Closing Notes
What began as a somewhat humorous exercise to justify creampuff swans revealed some decent evidence that such a soleltie could have existed in the later years of the SCA period. Certainly, variations of the modern creampuff components were being prepared prior to 1600 and with the well-documented fondness for illusion foods, I think the creampuff swan would have been a not unfamiliar yet welcome addition to the medieval table.
References
(1) Scully, Terence. The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge. 1995. pg. 104-109
(2) The Chefs of Le Cordon Bleu. Le Cordon Bleu Patisserie and Baking Foundations. Delmar, Clifton Park, NY. 2012. pg 7
(3) A.W. The Book of Cookrye. Edward Allde, London. 1584. Online source used. http://jducoeur.org/Cookbook/Cookrye.html
(4) Allen, Thomas. Two Fifteenth Century Cookery-Books. N. Trubner, London. 1888 Online source used.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;rgn=main;view=text;idno=CookBk
(5) Scappi, Bartolomeo, Quinto Libro, Libro Delle Paste, translated June 2006 by Mistress Helewyse de Birkestad.
http://www.medievalcookery.com/helewyse/pastavoto.html
