Chop the white meat of cooked chicken and turkey very fine and mix with 3 chopped truffles and some chopped parsley. Season with the grated peel of ½ lemon, a pinch of nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste, and moisten with cream. Make a puff-paste and roll out very thin. Cut into squares and fill with a tablespoonful of the mixture. Press the ends together and fry in deep hot lard until a light brown. Drain and serve very hot with tomato-sauce.
A fried turnover of minced poultry, closer to a Russian pirozhok than to anything called a patty today. The recipe gives no quantities, so treat the filling as a ratio problem and the pastry as the part that needs discipline.
- QuantitiesNothing is measured. About 2 cups of finely chopped cooked white meat, 2 to 3 tablespoons of parsley and 3 to 4 tablespoons of cream will fill roughly thirty 3-inch squares at the tablespoonful the recipe specifies. The mixture should hold together when pressed, not run.
- TrufflesThree whole truffles was a luxury flourish even when this was written, and fresh black truffle now costs more than the rest of the dish combined. A tablespoon of finely chopped preserved truffle, or a handful of dried porcini soaked and minced, gives a dark, savoury note of its own; truffle oil added off the heat is a thinner substitute but workable.
- Puff pasteStore-bought all-butter puff pastry is a fair swap for the homemade laminated dough intended here. Roll it thinner than you would for a tart, around 1/8 inch, or the fried seams stay doughy in the middle.
- SealingThe hinge of the recipe. "Press the ends together" is not enough for deep fat: brush two edges with beaten egg or water, fold corner to corner into a triangle, press firmly and crimp with a fork. A patty that opens in the fryer empties itself into the fat.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard is still sold and fries beautifully, but any fat with a high smoke point works. Hold it at 360 to 375F. Below that the pastry drinks oil; above it the outside colours before the layers have set. Two to three minutes per batch, turned once, gives the light brown asked for.
- ChillingNot mentioned in the original. Rest the filled patties in the refrigerator 20 minutes before frying so the butter is cold going into the fat and the layers lift.
- Tomato sauceTomato sauce of this period could mean a smooth cooked sauce, often thickened with roux, rather than the chunky pasta sauce the phrase now suggests. A simple reduced tomato puree finished with butter suits the richness better than anything herby.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as a first course, or six to eight passed as an appetiser. They must be eaten hot; reheated, the pastry goes leathery.
The dish belongs to the family of small filled pastries that runs across Russian and Eastern European cooking, of which the fried pirozhok is the best known member. What arrives on this page, though, has passed through a French kitchen on the way: puff paste, truffles, lemon zest and nutmeg, and a tomato sauce to serve are the vocabulary of the restaurant cooking that dominated grand Russian tables through the nineteenth century, when French chefs staffed aristocratic households in St Petersburg and Moscow. A book arranged by day and by nationality like this one traded in exactly that kind of shorthand — a recipe was Russian if it carried the right associations, not necessarily because a Russian cook would recognise it. The instruction to use cooked chicken and turkey also suggests a leftovers dish dressed up.