For centuries, European cooks baked pies with crusts so hard they could last for months—because the crust was just packaging. The bizarre history of coffyns reveals a time before refrigeration when pastry was Tupperware.
Imagine serving your family a beautiful pie, then watching them eat only the filling before tossing the entire crust in the trash. To modern sensibilities, this seems wasteful and strange. But for medieval and Renaissance cooks, this wasn't just normal—it was the entire point.
These weren't pies as we know them. They were coffyns, and their crusts were never intended for consumption. They were edible containers, ancient food storage technology that allowed cooked meats and stews to last for weeks or even months without refrigeration.
Medieval coffyn paste was made from flour, water, and sometimes lard, mixed into a dense, thick dough. Bakers would form these into tall-sided cases, often molding them around wooden forms to create sturdy vessels. The resulting crusts could be an inch thick or more—essentially baked clay made from grain.
Once filled with meat, game, or fish, these pies were sealed and baked for hours. The long cooking time both prepared the filling and created an airtight seal. As the pie cooled, fat from the filling would solidify, creating an additional barrier against air and bacteria. Some recipes called for pouring clarified butter through a hole in the top crust to fill any gaps, further preserving the contents.
Stored in cool pantries, these meat pies could remain edible for months. They were the Ziploc containers of their day, allowing households to preserve cooked food without the benefit of canning, freezing, or even reliable cool storage.
The transformation of pie crust from disposable container to delicious component happened gradually, driven by several factors. As refined white flour became more affordable and butter more accessible, pie crusts became tender enough to actually enjoy eating. The development of better food preservation methods—root cellars, spring houses, and eventually iceboxes—meant pies no longer needed to serve as long-term storage.
By the 18th century, cookbook authors were including recipes for 'short' pastry enriched with butter or lard, designed to be flaky and pleasant to eat. The idea of leaving crust on your plate became a sign of poor manners rather than standard practice.
Some descendants of coffyns survive in modern cuisine. British pork pies still use a hot water crust—a sturdier pastry designed to support the filling without a pie tin. French pâté en croûte envelops forcemeat in pastry that, while technically edible, often plays a supporting role to the rich filling. Even the term 'coffin' lingers in historical baking circles, though its morbid connotations (it shares etymology with the burial kind) have made 'crust' a more appealing alternative.
Understanding this history changes how you might think about pastry's role in cooking. Crust doesn't always have to be the star—sometimes it's structure, sometimes it's a vehicle for other flavors, and sometimes it's just practical. This knowledge frees you to experiment with different pastry thicknesses and compositions depending on your goal.
The next time a recipe calls for blind-baking a crust or warns about soggy bottoms, remember that for centuries, soggy wasn't a concern because no one was eating the bottom anyway. Our ancestors would probably find our obsession with perfect, flaky, golden crusts as peculiar as we find their disposable ones.