Forme of Cury says:

“Take þer lire of Pork and kerue it al to pecys. and hennes þerwith and do it in a panne and frye it & make a Coffyn as to a pye smale & do þerinne. & do þeruppon zolkes of ayrenn. harde. powdour of gyngur and salt, couere it & fry it in grece. oþer bake it wel and serue it forth.”

I read this as:

“Take the liver of pork and carve it all to pieces and hens with it and put it in a pan and fry it and make a coffin (as a small pie) and put the mix in that with hardboiled egg yolks, powdered ginger and salt, cover it and fry in grease, or bake it well, and serve it forth”.

The first thing to say is that everybody else translates “the lire” as meat. The Samuel Pegge edition of 1780 said it was that, and everybody’s gone with that theory.

It occurs in several places in Forme of Cury and from context I’m confident it’s liver. For instance, the recipe for Roo Broth says “Take the lire of the Deer oþer of the Roo” (take the lire of the [red] deer or of the roe deer). A similar manuscript, Ancient Cookery (1480) gives “lyvre” as its main ingredient for its Roo Broth recipe.

There certainly are other chewet recipes that use meat and raisins and all the other regular pie stuff, but I think Forme of Cury is doing something a little different.

This could be a recipe mixing liver with boiled chicken meat, but I’ve interpreted it to say that chicken livers are an alternative to pork liver. Trim them and fry in butter, which is most of the way to making paté. Crumbling eggyolks is generally a thickener in these dishes, so I interpret that to say that you’ve mushed the cooked livers down to a soft mix.

There are a variety of other chewet recipes in various documents. One in “A Noble boke off cookry” (1480) explicitly uses beef, and they add some verjuice, so I extrapolated to add a dash of verjuice to my mix as I think it gives it a lift, and because Alys’ yummy paté has that. I also use some chopped baked onion as a filler — bake the onions in their skins then discard the outside.

For 500g of chicken livers, I used 500g of butter, 1 tsp ginger, half tsp salt, two onions and a dash of verjuice. That made heaps of little pies, and I served them cold.

All the chewets recipes look for little pies and they recommend you fry them rather than bake them. If you fry them, I’d do them as little pasties, but the vibe I get from the recipes is that these are little pies and baking is easier than frying. For a feast, you can’t practically hand-raise a hundred little pies, so I do them in the smallest muffin trays, I do put tops on and I roughly pinch them for visual interest.