Elizabethan pea tarte

Week two of my Royal Food and Feasting Futurelearn course focuses on Elizabeth 1. One of the recipes is for a pea tarte.  This is my variant on the tarte. I prefer to minimize the amount of pastry I eat and tend to make my pies (aka Elizabethan tartes) in dishes with pastry covering the top rather than with the contents surrounded top and bottom with pastry. So this is my attempt at an Elizabethan green pea pie in that context.

Essentially the dish requires a hot oven, green peas, sweet butter, pepper, saffron, a bit of salt and pastry on top for the initial cook.  Then slosh a sprinkle of verjuice into the top and cook for a bit longer.  It's very simple but tastes great and you can certainly taste the difference with the verjuice. I was glad to pull out my Maggie Beer verjuice that I don't use often.

Ingredients

Green peas frozen
Unsalted butter
Pepper
Saffron
Salt
Puff pastry
Verjuice 

Mode

Preheat oven to 180c
If pastry frozen, remove to thaw
Place frozen peas in microwave for one minute or steam briefly
Place peas in small souffle dishes
Sprinkle with pepper, saffron and salt
Add about 2 tsp sweet i.e. unsalted butter to each dish
Cut the pastry into size for each dish
Cut a cross in the centre of each piece of pastry
Place the pastry on the top of each souffle dish
Peel back the triangles of the cross
Cook in the oven for 30 minutes
Remove from oven and pour dash of verjuice into each pie through the hole on top
Shake to mix ingredients
Remove to oven another 15 minutes.