Take And Make a Foyle Of Gode Past – Constructing A Chastelete

I left the last post HERE having explained what we were going to do with the chastelete recipe and why, so now it’s time to answer the bigger question…how did it turn out?
Those that follow on Twitter will already have seen some of this, but as much as I love Twitter for showing what we’re doing in the Kitchen, 140 characters is nowhere near enough to fully explain something like making a chastelete…how else will I get to ramble incoherently whilst showing you pictures of slabs of pastry?!?

So as you know, we were mashing together the recipe for chastelete from The Forme of Cury along with the designs for the Henrician Device Forts to produce a large pie, shaped like a castle.

I’d tasked Robin with the main responsibility for the pie because quite simply, he’s by far the best in the team  at making pastry; Marc H, Zak, Adrian, Dave, Ross and any others needed would assist with making paste in bulk, fillings, colourings etc while the rest of the team worked on other recipes and roasting. Robin had a plan…it was set in his mind…there would be no deviating from it, and in retrospect, although the rest of us thought he was mad and he should have changed his plans halfway through day 1…he was right to stick to his guns, this wouldn’t have been half of what it was if we’d got him to change the one driving obsession he had…thin walls.

First try

So first task on day one was pastry, and lots of it. We’d already discussed how big the whole thing should be…as big as would fit in the oven, so at most 10 inches high and 14 inches wide…length in proportion but at maximum 2 feet, give or take.

The very, very rough planning of dimensions for the chastelete.
The very, very rough planning of dimensions for the chastelete.

We settled on a central tower around nine inches in diameter and ten inches high, with four ancillary turrets around three inches in diameter and six inches high which would give a final product that would just fit on the tray we have to use because of being limited to using a modern oven for baking in.
Robin’s initial plan was to use a very stiff salt dough for the case so work was set to in order to produce what was hoped would be enough…as many volunteers and assistants from the visitors being sought to help out with the task and give them a taste of the work needed to make a decorative subteltie such as this.

About mid way through the day, there was sufficient paste to drive out a base sheet and place it onto the tray, which had first been filled with flour to even out the dents in the base. next task was to work on the first cylinder that would form the central tower. This did not go to plan!

Even though the paste was as stiff as Robin could make it, it was simply not strong enough to be self supporting when formed into a cylinder.

Mostly, this was down to the wall thickness that Robin wanted…it was never going to work with this pastry. The rest of us were all thinking…thicker…make it thicker, but Robin had other ideas…hot water crust…shame we hadn’t planned for that. Time to delve through the freezer and see how much lard we had in stock.
A swift hour of boiling fat & water and some hard kneading later there was enough paste to try another experimental cylinder, but not wanting to give up on the original plan just yet, two cylinders were formed around jars, one of hot water paste, the other salt dough and these were held in place with collars of paper then left to dry.

After a night in the warm embrace of the airing cupboard both tests were ‘leather dry’ and the jar formers were carefully removed. The salt dough was just not up to the task (as you can see from above after it had dried for a few hours more) but the hot water crust was good enough to show that this was the path to tread…and production began at full scale.

Crenellation Construction

The bulk of the construction of the basic pieces happened while I was busy elsewhere, so there aren’t any images to show unfortunately, not that they’d be that exciting. The paste was mixed and rolled into sheets around 5mm thick then cut to size forming rectangles that could be rolled around suitable formers. Before rolling the crenellations were cut long the top edge, then the paste was rolled up around a ceramic jar. The first experiments had shown that left as it was, the jar would stick fast to the pastry, so a layer of paper was added first then once the overlap had been sealed by damping the paste and squeezing tightly together, the whole cylinder was held together with a paper collar to keep it from sagging until it had firmed up slightly.
After an hour or so, the paste was freed from the paper and ceramic scaffolding and another was made; when all four were complete they went into the airing cupboard for the night. Meanwhile, the task of creating the central turret was causing some concern, simply because we didn’t have a ceramic jar or bowl that wasn’t wildly tapering…really not what was needed for a nice castle wall.

Fortunately thinking outside of the proverbial box meant Robin seized on the idea of using the newly delivered bucket of antibacterial wipes that we have for cleaning our office, store and break areas…it was the perfect size, but wasn’t able to be used in front of our visitors…no problem, everything would be prepared then the final forming would be done when the Palace closed and Robert would be you Aunt’s husband! (yes, I know I’ve just said that we didn’t do this in public so our visitors wouldn’t see the plastic tub, but I’m now showing you, so surely what’s the difference…context my friends, context. I can explain the why’s and wherefores to all of you here, this wouldn’t be possible if it was done ‘live’ in the Kitchens and people may never understand why we had to use a plastic bucket and an airing cupboard!)

Building and Blind Baking

So day 3 dawned and a day behind the planned schedule, construction of the actual castle could begin…if the pieces could be moved from their drying boards!
First task was to make another base plate and put this onto the newly re-floured metal baking tray. After that, the delicate task of moving the dry, but still very fragile, turrets into place. To do this Robin would utilise two of the knives in the set round his waist to carry the paste shells from board to base.

Once in place, adding the outer turrets could begin. These were first trimmed to remove a section of wall so that they would fit better to the main turret, then as before, carried on the blade of a knife from board to base to be placed carefully in position.

Once there, the previously made cut was re-trimmed to match the angle of the main wall it would bond to, and the two surfaces were held in place with beaten egg. This was repeated three more times until the basic shell was completed and ready to be blind baked.

Ready to go to the oven
Ready to go to the oven

As I’ve mentioned before, we are limited to having to use a modern gas oven for our baking, so it was off up to the Buttery kitchen (used by caterers when there are events held in the Great Hall) for an hour of standing looking at a stainless steel oven door.
First job was to re-seal all of the joints with beaten egg again before popping the whole thing into the oven on almost its lowest setting. We had originally planned to use dry peas to fill the castle to assist with the blind baking, but an error with our shopping meant that we didn’t have enough so Robin opted for his tried and tested blind baking method…regular checking and manipulating the paste if/as it deforms with the heat.

As you can see in the image above, the paste begins to dry from the top meaning the whole thing is liable to sag and sink as the base is the last part to firm up…a product of the modern oven not being hot enough at the bottom. This lead to Robin having to fiddle and manipulate the shape quite a bit….just after he said the doomed words “I think I feel confident enough to be able to just leave it now” as it happens.

Battling Battlements!

Meanwhile, down in the kitchen, Adrian and Dave were having ideas. I’d already asked Adrian to make some little pastry cannons to decorate the finished article with and this seems to have sparked a ‘we could do it differently’ attitude with him and Dave, so when Robin and I returned from the blind baking, sat on the table was chastelete mk2!

IMG_20160327_150937

Adrian was going for a slightly different design, 5 lobes not 4, and working with thicker paste. As far as I can tell it took 3 hours for them to get to the stage where it was sat blind baking in the oven…as opposed to 3 days!

All of this left the last day to fill and finish the original chastelete; Adrian and Dave only wanted to get this far as they knew that the ingredients for filling were limited…though Dave has taken it home to try and finish it there, should he be successful I’ll let you know, but be aware he was muttering about model people, sieges, undermining and gunpowder…so who knows what will happen with that!?!
Again, other tasks got in the way of me photographing the making of the fillings, but I can say that the end products were a marchpane mix coloured green with parsley juice, a custard coloured red(ish) with cochineal…it was supposed to be saunders but it got misplaced and the cochineal doesn’t play well with the heat of the custard…a fruit mix of apples, pears and some dry fruits, cooked together and left brown, and a white almond cream. All of this would be in the turrets round the outside, whereas the centre would hold a large, minced pork mix, spiced and flavoured with ginger, mace and a selection of other spices picked by visitors and Zak.

After filling, the final pie was slung in the oven to bake…resulting in this masterpiece!

The finished chastelete in all its glory
The finished chastelete in all its glory

Was it worth all the work? Damn straight it was…likewise with all the grief over the thin walls, as Robin said to me, what’s the point of doing it if it’s easy?

A man who's as pleased as pie!
A man who’s as pleased as pie!

Clearly, I’ve mentioned Robin a lot through this, because he was the one who fashioned the beast out of flour, fat and water…but it was very much a whole team effort and they should all be rightly proud of this result.

Proof of the Pudding

All this effort, four days of graft for what? A damn tasty pie…about ten minutes after the final photograph was taken and the chastelete removed to our office, this was the result:

10 minutes after the pie was taken into the office....carnage!
10 minutes after the pie was taken into the office….carnage!

I’ve put all of the images I took into a separate gallery HERE so you can see as much as I recorded. Some of the images above will open larger if you click on them so give that a try.
As always, comments, questions etc all welcome.

Castle Capers With Chasteletes

Rather than opt for an Easter egg-stravaganza, for the last of the cooking weekends for a while (see HERE for more on this), we decided to go big or go home and work on a pie inspired by the recipe for Chastelete taken from the Forme of Cury from around 1390…but brought up to date…well, the sixteenth century at least…and made in the shape of one of Henry VIII’s coastal Device Forts. Choosing the Device Forts as a basis for the design also allows us to link to Tudors on Tour at Camp Bestival where one of the thematic strands we’ll be talking about will be the forts at Sandsfoot and Portland…but which would we choose as the model for our chastelete?

First, let’s have a quick look at the recipe itself, which although we wouldn’t be following it word for word, would be the base for our work…though please note I am and will be using the ‘royal we’ here, as it’s actually Robin, Adrian, Zak and the rest of the team who’ll be doing the actual making part, I’m just the ideas man here 😉

Clearly it’s talking about a pastry pie shaped like a castle made of five cylindrical elements, the central one larger than the outer four…so taking that layout and comparing to the Device Forts, it was a simple decision to take our inspiration from either Camber, Walmer or Sandown (Kent)…we opted for Camber.

camber castle

As I said earlier, it was to be a case of go big, or go home…no half measures, make it as big as would be possible, spend the whole bank holiday weekend making it and damn the consequences….which was easy for me to say, not so easy for Robin to swallow though; but as I said to him, what’s the point of having someone that’s a demon with the pie cases if we can’t show him off?

Well apparently flattery will get you everywhere and after making a few measurements and a couple of rough sketches he went off to put his thinking cap on and work out how he wanted to approach the build. Again, we’d follow the recipe as far as the fillings were concerned…pork pie centre with almond cream, custard, minced fruit and fritter filling turrets, but for the actual paste components, other than the fact that they would be cylindrical and there’d be five of them, the rest was up to Robin.
What he decided was to work to the limitations presented as far as our ability to bake the final pie. We only have a modern gas powered catering sized oven to bake in, so that would determine the maximum height; and the tray/sheet that would fit within that oven would determine the arrangement of the outer turrets and the maximum length and width that the pie could be. Everything after that would be experimenting with different pastes to see which type would allow him to get the size required along with his personal desire for it to be as thin as possible.

So that was the planning/thinking….how did it work in practice?

 

 

Log Jam!

One of the questions we get asked a lot is “so what wood are you burning?” and the usual answer is something on the lines of “tree wood!” Yes it sound facetious, but it’s often the most accurate answer as the timber that we burn in the kitchens today is a hotch potch mix of whatever is in stock with our supplier at the time. We’ve had all sorts over the years from oak, beech and ash all the way to yew, some stunning box that was appropriated from the flames to make knife handles and a bowling ball…yes it was that thick!…and some eucalyptus that refused to be chopped into smaller pieces and simply wouldn’t burn it was that green…we were convinced that it you could have wrung it like a sponge it would have dripped everywhere. But the one thing almost all of it has in common is that it comes in short lengths, a bit like you see for sale all over the place for people with a fashionable log burner to buy, but perhaps a little chunkier.

So we know what we burn, but how much do we burn is a little more interesting. Until we embarked on five months of daily roasting last year, the State Apartment Warders that set and tend the fire each day would use up around 4m3 of wood each week; the fire is after all burning every day, whether we’re using it to roast or not. With the daily roasting that increased slightly to 6m3 a week, so over the five months around 130m3 of timber was burned…give or take! Now that might sound like a lot, especially as we were only cooking one 6Kg joint of beef a day, but can we put that in any form of context and compare it to how much wood was used by the Tudors? Possibly…with a LOT of caveats and approximation.

British Library Add. M.S. 24098 f18v, The Golf Hours
British Library Add. M.S. 24098 f18v, The Golf Hours

So first off, what does 130m3 of wood look like? Well according to thetree Forestry Commission timber calculator, if you can imagine a tree 2ft in diameter that’s 50ft tall….and then imagine 25 more of them…that’s what it looks like (though presumably that’s the main trunk only and not the smaller branches). Now how does that compare to the amounts that the Tudor court burned?

First stop

First stop has to be the Eltham Ordinances of which the version published in A collection of ordinances and regulations for the government of the royal household, made in divers reigns : from King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary, also receipts in ancient cookery, by the Society of Antiquaries in 1790 is most convenient to work with (even though it is prone to errors and is a mash-up of numerous sources). The ordinances defined the operating procedures for the court and give us many clues as to the operation of the household departments; though remember, the instructions given were for the court wherever it was located and not just at Hampton Court. We must not let the fact that Hampton Court survives for us to work in, cloud and confuse the textual information that we have simply because the building as we see it doesn’t always fit with the Ordinances as written. Unfortunately, the evidence that the Eltham Ordinances present us is vague to say the least! Apart from the Bouche of Court references which includes among the daily ration of bread, beer/wine and lighting, the allowance of fuel various court members were to receive as part of their membership at Court, the only useful references which may also include the fuel burned within the kitchen departments are found within the estimation of the expenses of the various departments within the household over and above those costs listed within the diets. These include the costs for Wood for Furnage of Bread and the costs for the Woodyard at £40 and £440 over and above the cost for Bouche of Court. I’ll ignore the bakery fuel for the moment as that’s clearly just for baking bread and not related to the other fires within the court, and instead concentrate on the woodyard expenses.

woodyard

The question is, how much firewood would £440 get you and for that we need to look elsewhere to find useable figures. So far I have only come across 4 sets of figures where a specific quantity of wood for a specific cost is given, it’s much more common to find expenses simply for “firewood” with no quantity; and of these 4 figures, one is slightly anomalous as the cost per unit works out to be nearly 10 times greater than the other examples…I’ve still got more work to do to see if there’s a reason for that so for now am happier to stick with the lower cost per unit rather than include this much higher figure….I did say it was going to get sketchy  😎

So what are those figures? For the meeting at Guisnes wood was purchased at a cost of  178l. 9s. 5¾d for 691,400 tallwood and billet. In the same accounts, the Bishop of Durham paid 6l. 8s. 4d for 27,000 billets and finally  17s. 8d was paid for 2,500 billets for wheel wrights to make tug-pins from in 1515, a figure which usefully points out to us that these talwood and billets may not have just been for fuel. If we take these costs and divide them by the amount of wood then a figure of 0.06d per unit is arrived at meaning that the £440 spent by the woodyard would have been able to buy around 1,760,000 talshide and billet for use by the court!

But what were talshides and billets?

The sale of fuel wood was controlled by the Assize of Fuel which set the size that certain types of fuel was to be sold at. An assize set in the 34th year of Henry VIII’s reign, and according to the details in the Edward VI assize was the same as issued under Edward IV, is known to have existed but it seems that no copy survives for us to study today. The next version that does exist was set under Edward VI and then reinforced and clarified by Elizabeth. There is also a surviving Assize for the City of London which can be found in The Customs of London, otherwis known as Arnold’s Chronicle which presumably dates from the end of the fifteenth century given that the chronicle was originally published in 1503.

Pierpoint Morgan Library, Morgan ms M 157 f 3r, http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/2/77035
Pierpoint Morgan Library, Morgan ms M 157 f 3r, http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/2/77035

All of these versions of  the assize  define the size in both length and circumference that certain units of timber should be sold at; these units are talshides, defined from a no.1 to no.5, and billets, which come in three differing sizes. The assize also covers faggots but these were probably only used within the bakehouse at Hampton Court and thus form part of a completely different subject to the one at hand! The 7 Edw.VI cVII assize defines the five sizes of Talshides as follows:

Talshide no.

Circumference at middle in inches

1

16

2

23

3

28

4

33

5

38

All are four foot long, not including the carf (cut) at the end of the log, and should be of the statute diameter within a foot of the middle of the log. The assize of 43 Eliz. cXIV added half and quarter cut versions for the talshides, but in a move to protect consumers stated that should a log fall between two sizes it should be considered to be the smaller of the two so that the customer effectively got the difference in size free.

Talshide no.

Circumference at middle in inches – full

Circumference at middle in inches – half

Circumference at middle in inches – quarter

1

16

19

18.5

2

23

27

26

3

28

33

32

4

33

39

38

5

38

44

43

Compare these to the figures found in Arnold’s Chronicle here:

Talshide no.

Circumference at middle

1

20

2

26

3

32

4

38

5

44

and we can see that there was a marked reduction in the size of talshides destined for sale. According to the opening statement of the Edward VI assize, this was due to a scarcity of firewood through the previous sixty years and the “Greatness” of the previous assizes…a “Greatness” of approximate 1/3 of a cubit foot (0.009m3) difference between the previous version and the Edward VI assize (presuming the assize detailed in Arnold’s Chronicle is the same as set under Edward IV); which if one considers the 1,760,000 talshides previously mentioned, would equate to 15,840m3. So the Edward VI assize would have intended quite a saving in fuel use, over 3100 of those trees I mentioned earlier in this example, though to what extent changing the unit of fuel would have impacted actual fuel use is another matter.

After talshides, billets were categorized as either single, billets called cast or billets called two cast. All were three foot four inches in length, but unlike the talshide, the carf (cut) was to be included in the length…no free fuel here, unlike the talshides. The Edward VI sizes are given as:

Billet name

Circumference in inches

Single

7.5

Cast

10

Two cast

14

whereas the Elizabethan ones, which were again separated into full round, half round and quarter round, were :

Billet name

Full round in inches

Half round in inches

Quarter Round in inches

Single

7.5

Na

Na

Cast

11

13

12

Two Cast

16

19

18.5

though single billets were only sold as fully round. The Arnold’s Chronicle figures are..complicated and are something I currently am not quite sure about. Billets are specified as :

The Customs of London, Otherwise Called Arnold’s Chronicle. London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington [etc.], 1811. p98
The Customs of London, Otherwise Called Arnold’s Chronicle. London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington [etc.], 1811. p98
and I am yet to get my head around how large “of resonable proporcio[n] and gretnes after the nombre of shyde that it be tolde fore” actually was.

Now I can only suggest that you get a tape measure out to get a sense of how large some of those logs were…until I did that they were just numbers on the page and you get a better understanding when you see what they actually looked like. To help with that, I did a quick recce through the woodpile in the Kitchens at work to see how close some of the logs we have waiting to be burnt actually are to the assize sizes. None come close to the length required, with the biggest ones we have coming in at around the 2ft 6 inch mark, but I was surprised at how many were pretty close to assize in circumference. To put that measurement in context I took some photos of three logs I pulled out at random that matched the circumferences from each of the different assizes above….I’ve used the internationally recognised standard measurement unit of the post-it note (not having a football field, London taxi or Olympic swimming pool to hand!) to give the scale as the ruler I had wasn’t particularly clear in the images. FYI the post-it note is 76mm x 76mm. (click on the images to enlarge them)

Once you start to be able to picture these sizes of timber, all of the surviving mediaeval images of firewood start to make sense…regular sizes, cut to regular lengths, and even if the images aren’t English and aren’t showing firewood of English assize dimensions, this uniformity of fuel makes perfect sense. In an age where timber forms a key part of so many facets of life, proper preparation, even in the growing, makes perfect sense. Why cut and split large trees down to size when you can just harvest them when they’re at the correct size? Yes we see images of wood being split down, but it’s not large trunk logs as we’d expect to be the case today, it’s much thinner, assize sized ones.

Wood cutter from Das Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung in Nürnberg Amb. 317.2 ° Folio 26 recto (Mendel I)
Wood cutter from Das Hausbuch der Mendelschen Zwölfbrüderstiftung in Nürnberg Amb. 317.2 ° Folio 26 recto (Mendel I)
detail from The Hague, KB, 133 D 11 fol 3r
detail from The Hague, KB, 133 D 11 fol 3r

 

 

 

 

 

Now all this information regarding assize sized timber is all well and good, but it is also entirely possible that the talsides used within Henry VIII’s court were of a completely different size and specification set just for the Court, as was the case for the Household of the Duke of Northumberland :

Specifications for shide sizes from The regulations and establishment of the household of Henry Algernon Percy, the fifth Earl of Northumberland, at his castles of Wresill and Lekinfield in Yorkshire, begun anno domini M.D.XII
Specifications for shide sizes from The regulations and establishment of the household of Henry Algernon Percy, the fifth Earl of Northumberland, at his castles of Wresill and Lekinfield in Yorkshire, begun anno domini M.D.XII

Here, shides are specified as being split down to three foot in length by a span (around 8-9 inches) thick, which would correspond to a statute #2 or #3 talshide. But what is important is to understand that the fuel used by the court was of regular, standardised dimensions and not the random assortment of timenr we have to burn today.

Next steps

So where next? Well one task is to look at all the surviving sixteenth century fireplaces in Hampton Court and see if they’re big enough for a 4ft

Will assize length logs fit widthways within the fireplaces at Hampton Court? Fireplace model (c) Cealpup on Sketchup Make 2016
Will assize length logs fit widthways within the fireplaces at Hampton Court?
Fireplace model (c) Cealpup on Sketchup Make 2016

long log to fit into…so far, the first two I’ve looked at are certainly wide enough for a 4ft talshide to be burned lengthwise across the fireplace without needing to be cut into shorter lengths; only time and further measuring will tell with the rest. As for the kitchen fireplaces, well they’re easily large enough for statute talshides to be placed in a multitude of orientations so we aim to look at different arrangements of setting the fire through the year to see if we can learn anything from practical experimentation…though obviously the first requirements for this will be to talk to our firewood supplier to see if it’s possible to get wood supplied to statute sizes at all, and if not then we’ll have to progress purely on paper.

Header image: The Pierpoint Morgan Library, MS M.452 fol. 3r, http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/3/76930