Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef Patties
Beef Patties
Shred one pound of under-cooked beef, a little fat and lean together; season with pepper or cayenne, salt, and a little onion or shallot. Make half a pound of puff-paste, not too rich, stamp it into a dozen rounds, place the mince on half of these, and cover them with the other half. Bind the edges with white of egg, and then fry the patties a light brown. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for six patties.
A leftovers dish dressed up as pastry: cold roast beef, chopped and seasoned, sealed in puff paste and fried rather than baked. The main thing to get right is the seal.
- The hinge: seal the edges properlyEgg white is the glue, but it only works on a dry edge, and the parcels must be crimped or pressed firmly all round. A patty that opens in the pan releases fat-soaked mince and floods the oil.
- "Under-cooked beef"This means underdone, i.e. rare; in practice most likely the remains of a cold joint. Use rare or medium-rare leftover roast, about 1 lb, trimmed of gristle but with a little fat left in for moisture.
- "Shred"In this period shredding meat means chopping it finely with a knife, not tearing it into strands. Do not use a food processor, which turns cold beef to paste.
- Puff paste, not too richHalf a pound of pastry is about 225 g; a sheet of all-butter frozen puff, thawed, is in the right region, though pack weights vary, so check. "Not too rich" most likely means a smaller proportion of butter to flour.
- Frying, not bakingShallow- or deep-fry at 340–350°F. Ten minutes is right for pastry this thick, but only at a steady moderate heat: hotter and the outside colours before the layers cook through, cooler and the paste drinks oil.
- YieldTwelve rounds make six patties, two rounds each. Roll to roughly 3½ inches across; the filling should sit in a mound in the centre with a clear half-inch border.
- Cost"2s." is two shillings, a household reckoning of the period and of no use as a modern guide.
- SeasoningPepper or cayenne, salt, and a little onion or shallot are the whole flavouring; the recipe offers a choice in each case. Sweat the onion or shallot briefly first if you object to its rawness — ten minutes in the pan will not fully tame it.
Patties in Victorian usage were small filled pastries, savoury and hand-sized, closer to a rissole or a Cornish pasty than to the flat American meat patty the word now suggests. The recipe belongs to a whole class of directions for using up the cold joint emales that roasted large pieces of meat and were expected to make them last several days without waste. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted in expanded form for decades, was aimed squarely at that kind of middle-class household: alphabetical, exhaustive, and always ready with a use for yesterday's beef.