It's a New Dawn, it's a New Ember Day Tart

Hey nonny ho, and welcome back travellers! Today we begin Medieval week and I thought it would be best to kick things off with a fast, after our glorious Roman feast. Of course, when I say fast I mean Medieval style, in that I just don't eat meat, but the Catholic Church says eggs and dairy are perfectly acceptable. 

I used this recipe I found on a website called Medieval Cookery, and god bless the people who came together to compile the recipes on there. Honestly, this was the easiest week in terms of research, because there were absolutely loads of recipes on there. I will just do you all a solid though and convert the measurements into metric. But thank you very much Daniel Myers for your delicious recipe.

Ember Day Tart

Ingredients

4 Tbsp. butter, melted
1/2 tsp. salt
pinch saffron

6 eggs
1/2 medium onion, coarsely chopped (I used a small whole onion and that worked fine).
1/2 lb. soft cheese, grated (225g for us wild metric users!)
1/2 cup currants (zante currants) (65g)
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. parsley
1 tsp. sage
1 tsp. hyssop (I used mint)
1 tsp. powder douce

Method

1. Grind saffron with salt, mix with butter, and set aside.
2. Place onions into boiling water and cook until just tender and drain.
3. Beat eggs and combine with saffron-butter, onions, and remaining ingredients, pour into pastry shell, and bake at 350°F (180C/160C fan) for one hour.

I will say, the one thing that threw me into quite the tizzy at the supermarket was determining what on earth gratable, soft cheese was. I was going to go for mozzarella, but then as I debated things in my mind I thought 'Would Medieval people have a cheese like mozzarella? If I'm doing English Medieval cooking would they know what that is?' So then I thought maybe Brie or Camberbert would do, but I don't know if you can really grate either of those two. In the end I went with a Wensleydale, it has a nutty flavour, but soft crumbly texture. Not quite as hard as Parmesan or Chedder, but gratable. I also assumed that it would probably be the cheese most recognisable to Medieval people, but whether or not this is true I'm not quite sure. Either way, I thought it would be best to pick something, rather than continue staring at all the cheese in the supermarket aisle and have people thinking 'Is she alright? She's just been staring at the cheese for five minutes...' Otherwise they may have thought I was having a melt down! Do you get it? Melt down, because cheese can be... Never mind.