I was in a quandry a few nights ago.  I had to use the pork I had pulled from the freezer.  I didn’t have enough for a full meal of sweet and sour (blackberry vinegar and brown sugar) pork or Roman pork with apricots.  So I hit the books for a quick idea.  Luckily I had everything on hand!

Chawettys:

Pork and Blue Cheese Pies

Translation:

Small pies. Take pork seethed & minced dates, and grind them small together; take yolks of eggs & put thereto a good heap & green cheese put thereto; & when it is small enough take Ginger, Cinnamon & mix weel they mixture therewith & put in thine coffins; then take olks of Eggs hard seethed and cut them in two, & lay above & backe them & so not closed, serve forth. (Renfrow, pg 130)

Ingredients:

2 lbs ground pork

5-10 well chopped dates (remove pits)

2 tsp each ground ginger and ground cinnamon

2 raw egg yolks

5 cooked egg yolks

1 C. blue cheese

Redaction:

I took two pounds of pork and ground it fine. Possibly to fine as I used my Cuisinart. (No slave labor or kitchen serf to do the hand grinding.) I chopped up the dates very fine.  The eggs are from my English Speckled Sussex chickens. The hens are laying very well during the spring and summer months.

Once you have everything gathered this goes pretty fast.  Add the blue cheese and dates to the meat.

Then add the spices. Mix well together.

I added the eggs (raw) to the meat and mixed again.

The finished mix is pretty much looking like a pork meatloaf.

The crust is a butter crust from Scappi. I used Scappi instead of more English crust because as the cook, I like the Italian crust a bit better. Cook’s choice and all that.

Two pounds could probably get 4 pies but I only have 3 pie forms…hence the three pies.   The savory pie is supposed to be served open, without a top crust, however I had enough dough to make a small top hat that just looks cute (and a little more polished) for presentation.  The boiled egg yolks were cut in half and placed decoratively around the pie crust top hat. Cook at 350 for 45 minutes.

I might have overfilled the open face pies a little (a lot).

The finished pie(s).

This is damn good.  My husband is asking for this on a regular basis after the first bite (and pie).  I would do a couple of things slightly different but these are a taste thing.  The dates were far more subtle than I liked. I really like the dichotomy between savory pork and sweet dates. If you prefer more savory and only a hint of the sweet stick with 5 dates, if you want a little more sweet in your savory add a few more dates.