This one’s a bit controversial.

In the day, one of the old SCA cookbooks had a recipe using commercial brie cheese, with a rind. I had it several times in my early years, and even made it myself, but I can’t say it was worth the trouble or expense.

Forme of Cury gives a recipe:

Take a Crust ynche depe in a trape. take zolkes of Ayren rawe & chese ruayn & medle it & þe zolkes togyder. and do þerto powdour gyngur. sugur. safroun. and salt. do it in a trape, bake it and serue it forth.

Which I render as:

Take an inch-deep piecrust in a piedish. Take eggyolks and “chese ruayn” and mix it and the yolks together, and add powdered ginger, sugar, saffron and salt. Cook in the piedish and serve it forth.

I gather that a “trape” is a round ceramic piedish, that you would put in the cooler oven once the bread had finished. You wouldn’t have many trapes, and they would break easily, so this is a dish for the elite.

The big question here is what is chese ruayn? The original publisher of the Forme of Cury thought it might be roan (pale red colour) or rowan cheese (apparently made in Autumn).

I simply read it as “runny” cheese, on the same spelling theory as “oynouns” in the previous recipe. But apparently that’s not it.

Chese ruayn also gets a mention in the recipe for Loseyns (lasagne), where it is grated. It may well have been a cheese made in the Brie region of France, suitable for transporting to England, but we should not assume it’s the same as the little round packets of Brie we get in the supermarkets.

And we should not assume that a medieval grater was the elegant little thing we buy today. Indeed, it was probably a grate made by the blacksmith for bulk food production, and in Forme of Cury it is otherwise used to turn stale bread into breadcrumbs for thickening with.

There are many mistakes and inconsistencies in Forme of Cury, so some interpretation is often required. I’ll read the recipe to say we should have a soft white cheese, not necessarily tough enough that a grater is an assistance in making the tart.

There’s a version of this recipe in “Liber Cure Cocorum”, another recipe book of about the same time, that specifies “rawe chese” in this dish. So I think I’m on the money.

In practice, I use Philadelphia Cream Cheese, a non-sweet cheese famed for cheesecakes. Or its Aldi equivalent, which is cheaper and works fine.

I chop it into small blocks, as I don’t have a medieval grater, add eggyolks and “powder douce” (a pre-made mixture of sweet spices including ginger and sugar). I usually add raisins, because they’re in several other tarts of the time and I like the flavour. I get a blind-baked piecrust and fill it with this mixture, and bake till ready, from the colour on top. It does need sugar or honey, and then it’s palatable to modern tastes.

Actually I mostly make this tart at Rowany Festival, in a camp oven. I’ve got quite good at cooking them; less good at transferring them intact to a plate for serving.