Coddled Pie

“To coddle” means to treat someone gently and indulgently. Originally, it meant to feed on caudle, an ultra-digestible food designed for invalids and women in childbed: a thin porridge mixed with wine, sugar and spices.

(Scholars aren’t sure whether “coddling” in the sense of cooking gently--e.g., coddled eggs--is the same word or whether it comes from some unknown root. By the way, for centuries it was mostly apples, not eggs, that people coddled.)

In the Middle Ages, caudle wasn’t always invalid food. A 14th-century English royal cookbook called “The Forme of Cury” included a number of suave soups and sauces under the name. The simplest was the usual caudle with expensive almond milk in place of dull old oatmeal.

But it also gave seafood soups, such as cawdel of muskels (chopped mussels in almond milk flavored with sour grape juice, leeks, onions and spices) and cawdel of saumon (pretty much the same, only made with poached salmon and thickened with bread crumbs).

And then there was cawdel ferry, which was wine, sugar and spices lightly thickened with egg yolks. It survived at least down to the 17th century--as a treatment for pie. When a pie was done, you’d lift off the crust and pour in a cup of this sort of caudle to moisten and flavor it.

This is still a baker’s trick for keeping the apples in apple pie from getting mushy. You sugar your apple slices and let them sit and shed some of their moisture before making the pie. When the pie is done, you punch a hole in the crust and return the juices plus some boiled-down cider, all thickened with cornstarch.

Of course, in the 17th century they were caudling lobster pies and artichoke pies, too. And when’s the last time you had either of those?