I gather that pastry is something we’ve perfected in the modern age. From spending lots of time with ancient recipe lists, I’m pretty confident that most of the pastry they actually used before at least 1500 was just “paste”, flour and water, maybe with a little lard for taste. Or perhaps the pastry chefs weren’t the ones writing down their recipes.

Forme of Cury gives “payn puffe”, which uses egg yolks as the shortening, for a puffy sweet pastry. As a feast cook, I can’t really afford to do that except for very dainty dishes, so it might as well not exist. Payn puffe seems to get served by itself rather than in a specific pie, so I suspect it’s a special treat of its own. There are some hints (as I read the recipes) that it’s yeasted, so I must attempt that some time.

A Propre new booke of Cokery (1545) gives a shortcrust pastry recipe, with no quantities, with some eggyolks in the mix.

I’m not an expert on 16th century pastry, and I’ll bet the Elizabethan cooks had a bit more nuance in their pastries as that was their thing. They didn’t necessarily write it down, where I’ve been able to find it.

Alys is a pastry enthusiast and has a variety of specialist pastries she uses for different purposes. She cubes her shortening and measures down to 10 gram portions.

Life’s too short for that, frankly. I have bulk-production systems.

Hot Water Crust

My hot-crust pastry has to work efficiently with the standard units of stuff they sell in Aldi and Woolies, and not require too much elbow-grease from me. Here’s my recipe, from trial and error:

Stir with a wooden spoon, then mix by hand. Roll out and use quickly. Doesn’t work as well in cold weather, so run a heater!

This mix makes 24+ closed pies (for trays of 12), and you’d like to have 2 people to make and fill the pies in the time before the pastry goes off. So don’t scale up, make extra mixes when you need them.

Use spray oil lightly on your pie tins, put the pastry in, prick the bottom a few times with a fork, and for closed pies brush the bottoms (ie facing up) with egg wash to hopefully avoid soggy bottoms, unless your pie mix is too wet. We’ll freeze closed pies like that, and brush them with egg wash when they go in the oven.

For open tarts, cover with greaseproof paper and put in some baking beans: Alys likes the ceramic type, and I like to keep a jar of actual beans which are cheaper. Heat at 200 degrees until it’s starting to turn brown. Very light brown if you’re going to put it back in the oven with a filling!

Shortcrust

I’ve been experimenting with using the food processor to make a paté brisée pastry, with excellent results. Scaling to Aldi-friendly quantities, I use 500g flour, 250g butter, 160 mL cold water, and a good pinch of salt. Use the pulse setting until it forms a dough. Refrigerate then roll out.