A medieval tale that never goes stale

From the Battle of Crécy to the bakeries of Chorleywood, this is a dish with a hinterland

STEPHEN HARRIS

Pasteur, but I find French dairy products taste like cooked milk – this is one reason you can’t get a decent cup of tea over there. It seems strange that they will go daily to the baker but then buy their milk in bulk. I suppose we do the opposite.

Today’s recipe uses up stale bread. We have bread and butter pudding, the Italians have panzanella (a bread and tomato salad) and the French have pain perdu or “lost bread” but this recipe has a poetic name, “Poor knights of Windsor”.

I thought I would look into the origins of such an interesting name. It all goes back to the 1340s and the fallout from the great English victory at the battle of Crécy. Under the feudal system, knights would recruit soldiers to fight for the King from the peasants who lived on their land. It was possible for a knight to be captured and held to ransom after a battle; many such knights returned to England impoverished.

The “poor knights of Windsor” were given a pension and board at Windsor in return for praying for the King and supporting those in the simultaneously established

Order of the Garter. Their name was changed to the “military knights of Windsor” in the 19th century.

The confusion comes when one realises that a lot of European countries have the same stale-bread recipe. There are examples from Germany, Denmark, Finland and many others. All of them have a name which refers, in whatever the relevant language is, to poor knights. This suggests that the Windsor reference was just our addition in this country.

So you may have to leave your bread out to dry, and it may not be a celebration of when the English made toast of the French at Crécy – but it does make a lovely pudding.

Stephen Harris is chef-patron of The Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent, whose many awards include the number one spot in the Estrella Damm Best Gastropub Awards 2018