Baking a Pie in a Dutch Oven

In my “sad farmer” story — no I still don’t have a title yet — my heroine has learned to bake bread in the “Dutch oven” over hot coals, and now she’s moving on to making pies and tarts — sweet and savory. At the moment (in my story) having learned to gather wild spring greens, she’s making a tart with eggs and cottage cheese and spring greens. Sounds yummy, don’t you think? I hope so.

My Irish grandmother was a big fan of feeding us a range of wild spring greens —some of which were quite bitter. She claimed it “cleaned the blood” after winter. I’m not so sure about that, but in  soups or in stews they were quite tasty — though dandelion leaves (of which she was particularly fond) were quite bitter. She claimed the bitterness was doing us good.  :(  She also loved cooking up nettles, but they disappeared quite well into vegie soup. 

I only occasionally gather wild spring greens. My adult students — mainly southern European and Chinese — showed me the best greens to collect. I don’t go out of my way to gather them, but when I do, I feel slightly virtuous. My favorite way to eat them is in the Greek dish, “horta” which is just a range of greens, lightly simmered with garlic, salt and pepper and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. Yum yum. There’s a recipe for horta here.

Here’s a youtube video that demonstrates the pie-baking process. It refers to American colonial times, but these techniques were also in use in England and Australia. Also, in the video he makes a beef pie and then on his second tasting, adds some mushroom ketchup. Naturally I was intrigued by this, so looked up a recipe for it.

Have you ever baked pies or tarts in a Dutch oven? Ever gathered wild spring greens? Eaten horta? Made your own ketchup?