Cruste Rolle
Cruste Rolle
Cruste Rolle
Making bread in the middle ages was expensive in both time and cooking fuel. Many bakers would bake other people's dough in their ovens and charge a fee for doing so. Those who couldn't afford to bake their bread in an oven would make "flat bread' or "pan bread' by frying dough on a girdle or in a skillet or frying pan.
Bread made in this way does not rise like oven baked bread but is both tasty and filling. This recipe for "Cruste Rolle' is almost identical to the 'frying pan bread' recipe I learned in the Scouts (although we definitely didn't use saffron!) and have enjoyed cooking over camp fires for years.
An interesting variation of this bread recipe is to make a foot long "sausage' or 'Damper' of the dough mix and wrap it spirally around a thin green stick. The spiral of dough is then "baked' directly over the glowing embers of a fire, smeared with butter and eaten hot.
Why not try it next time you have a barbecue?
Ingredients:
6 saffron stems
2 or 3 tablespoonsful of boiling water
8 ozs of plain white flour
Pinch of salt
2 ozs of butter or lard
2 eggs
A knob of butter or lard for frying
The original 15th Century recipe:
Take fasyre small flower of whete; nym Eyroun & breke ther-to, & coloure the past with Safroun; rolle it on a borde also thinne as parchment, rounde a-bout as an oblye; frye hem and serue forth; and thus may do in lente but do away the eyroun & nym mylke of Almaundys, and frye hem in Oyle and then serue forth.
From Harleian Ms. 279 p.46.
(Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks. Edited by Thomas Austin)
Method:
Put the saffron in a pestle and mortar. Grind it for a minute or two then add the boiling hot water. Stir until the water goes a brilliant yellow then leave the mixture to cool.
Mix the flour and salt together and then rub in the fat. In other words drop the fat into the flour and salt and use your fingers to rub flour into the fat. Do this for a while and you will create a coarse textured mix that looks rather like fine breadcrumbs.
Drop the eggs, saffron and water into a mug and give it a good whisk then pour the yellow mixture onto the flour and fat mix. Get busy with your fingers until you have a fairly moist dough that comes away easily from the side of the bowl. Do not make this mixture too dry. If you need to add more fluid then a drop of water (and I mean a drop) should do the trick.
Roll the dough out quite thinly (the recipe calls for parchment thin but I think that may be a bit too skinny) and then cut it into side plate sized circles (about 6" across).
Aim to get between three and five circles of dough from this mixture.
Grease your girdle or a thick cast iron frying pan with butter or lard (I prefer butter) and heat over a fire or stove. Trial and error will quickly show you how hot this needs to be. This bread does tend to burn quite easily so be careful.
Carefully put a dough round into the pan or onto the griddle. Turn the bread once during cooking. Turning the bread more than once allows it to soak up a lot of hot butter and makes it rather greasy.
This wonderful bread is always best eaten hot but do beware of indigestion!
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