I love bread.
There, I said it, I admit it. I love bread.
And that is why it pains me that Medieval manuscripts
rarely talk about bred. It's
probably because they were written by cooks, for cooks, rather than
bakers, but I wish that we had actual contemporary
bread recipes from the time. But!
the Harleian Manuscript 279 does have
one. Now its a 15th century recipe for something
Brede and Rastons, or bread and rastons.
I don't know how to pronounce it, probably rastons you know
it definitely had a lot of French influence plus I think it sounds fancy.
Anyway today I'm going to teach you how to make your own rastons at home,
and let you decide that age old question which has broken up
many a family - is a raston bread
or is it pastry? This time
on Tasting History.
Now i've put the original 15th century recipe in
the description below but its kind of in a Middle English dialect
so good luck with that. Though you can
actually get most of it which is kinda cool. But I'm also
going to give you some of the highlights right now in Modern English.
"Take fayre flour and the white of egg and a little yolk.
Then take warme barme and put these together
until the dough is crumbly. Cast sugar into it
and let it rest a while.
Then place in an oven and let it bake.
Then cut the top crust in the shape of a crown.
Put clarified butter inside, and stir the crumbs
and butter together. Cover it with the crust you cut away
and put it in the oven again. Then take it out and serve it forth.
So as far as Medieval recipes go, this is pretty darn
good. You know it doesn't have exact measurements or
bake times or anything like that but
they never do, but in essence
it gives you everything you need to know. So good job Medieval
scribe! "Thank you". But here's the question,
with all of that sugar and butter
and egg, is this a pastry or
is it bread? Now the term pastry was not
something really used in the Middle Ages to refer to pastry
as we think of it today. Pastry simply referred to
the shell of a pie , or tart and that
was it. But by today's standards some people would actually call
this a pastry, so I mean I honestly don't know.
And until I taste it I'm not gonna
be able to really make an informed opinion. If you have a strong
opinion either way, please let me know in the comments
either now or when you make it at home.
But I digress, lets get to the ingredients. First fayre flour. We're going to use 450 grams.
Now fayre flour is not the same as processed, bleached, all white, all purpose flour that we have today.
It's actually not THAT far off in comparison with some of the other flours that were used at the time.
It's finely ground, well sifted wheat flour, and it's basically the closet you're going to get to modern all purpose flour, but really it's not the same.
So I'm actually using about half all purpose flour, mixed with half stone ground whole wheat flour.
And you know, that's what it's going to be, but if you have all purpose flour,
basically if you can find flour at this point in quarantine, whatever you got, it's good to use.
We're going to come back to flour later when we put on our history hats. I don't know what that looks like.
Is it a crown? or maybe that Mickey Sorceror's hat?
I need a history hat...
Next it called for white of egg and a little yolk.
So we're going to use 2 egg whites, and 1 yolk.
Now I'm actually going to use that 2nd yolk since we have it and I hate wasting things to brush on the top of the loaves at the very end before we pop them into the oven.
Just to kinda give it some kind of dark sheen make them pretty, but that is a Max Miller edition so don't feel that you need to it.
Then we get to the tricky part. It calls for warm barm.
Now if you make your own beer at home or if you have access to a brewery that is willing to sell it to you,
good on ya, use about a cup of warm ale barm.
But if you don't, we're going to make our own, or something akin to it.
So what you're going to need is:
a cup of warm ale, English ale, whatever you got.
And a packet or 7-8 grams of dried yeast.
So you want that ale to be above room temperature,
maybe like 90-100 degrees,
and you're going to take that yeast and pour it on in.
And mix it up.
Then let it set for about 10 minutes to get nice and foamy.
Finally, we need a little bit of sugar.
Now it said 'cast some sugar on it, how much sugar is it? I don't know.
We're going to use 2 tablespoons of brown sugar.
You can use a little bit more, you can use a little bit less, totally up to you.
Then 1 stick or 113 grams of butter.
Now the recipe does not call for salt but
they often would leave things like that out of old recipes
and salt is just a common thing in bread
so I'm actually going to throw a teaspoon of salt in there as well.
You can, you cannot, it's up to you. Nobody's looking! :)
Now after about 10 minutes your faux barm, or ale-yeast concoction
should be nice and foamy at which point you can go ahead and mix it with the two egg whites and one yolk.
Then toss in the sugar and mix that in.
Doesn't need to dissolve, just kinda break it up.
Then sift your flour into a bowl
and whisk in the salt if you're going to use it.
You want to mix it in because if it touches the yeast directly, bad things happen.
Now the original recipe says this dough should be short, or crumbly like short bread.
That's where the term comes from.
Which is a hallmark of -
pastry.
But, it also needs to rise like bread, meaning like you really need to work the gluten to get a little bit o fa stretch in it,
which is a hallmark of -
bread.
So here we are again.
No further along in our quest.
So mix all the ingredients up together in the bowl, and as it kinda comes together to form a crumbly dough,
you're going to put it out on a lightly floured surface and knead it.
Now you can use a stand mixer, but this is actually a pretty easy one to knead by hand, so
if you've ever wanted to knead a dough by hand this is your time.
Once it's nice and smooth after about 10 minutes of hand kneading or 4-5 minutes in a mixer
you're going to cover it and let it rise for about an hour or until it doubles in size.
Now while that rises, let's take a look at that main ingredient, the fayre flour.
You might remember if you watched the trencher episode (i'll put a link up on one of these sides)
the trencher episode we talked about lots of different flours that were used in medieval Europe, mainly medieval England.
Oat, and barley, and rye and even flour made of dried peas.
These were the flours of the masses.
But we,
are wealthy.
(Not really).
But today we're wealthy.
So today we're going to enjoy flayre flour, which is wheat flour.
"Wete, the loveliest corn men eat."
That was 13th century moorless, and didactic poet William of Waddington.
What he's referring to is what corn should be used to make communion wafers,
because you want them to be made out of the best, well that's going to be white, refined, wheat flour.
And by corn I mean any grain because until relatively recently, like 200 years ago,
corn basically referred to grain in general.
So Waddington's observation about wheat being the proper corn for communion wafers
also extended to other breads.
And you know, wheat was the corn of the upper crust.
It could be refined into a pale white powder that was very high in gluten,
which gave bread a wonderful rise.
Which is probably why Scarface was so in love with it.
Anyways, it was prized but the men that made it, the Millers, my stock,
they were not always the most liked people in town,
and frankly it was dangerous to make.
So let's take a look at what made bringing flour to the people so darn hard.
Let us start with