Early Forms of Pastry

Virtually every culture has some form of pastry, stretching back at least to early recorded history. The first known written recipes, cuneiform-incised clay tablets dating from 1700 BCE Mesopotamia, include ones for birds served in pastry. Until the development of relatively inexpensive sources of sugar, most pastries were savory pies. England, from whence much of America’s pastry tradition derives, had bustling pie markets by the Middle Ages. In fourteenth-century London, statutes governed “pastelers” who “baked in pasties rabbits, geese and garbage [offal]” for sale to the public. Pies were a convenient “take-out” meal for urban dwellers, especially those too poor to have kitchens. The “pasties” were often inedibly tough, for the crust was designed to serve as a vessel for cooking, transporting, and storing the meats, rather than as a delectable contrast to the filling. Cooks pieced together “standing” pastes that could be baked, unsupported by a pan, without collapsing and that could preserve for days, or even weeks, the meats within by sealing out air with melted fat.