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Bread Croustades
Bread croustades are baked in a variety of shapes. The inside or crumb is scooped out, and the outer part or crust is fried, and then dried from the fat and filled with mincemeat or ragout. In Scotland croustades or moulds are made of mashed potatoes, and lined with gratin composed of the white parts of fowl or veal seasoned with salt, pepper, and herbs. Munster loaves may be classed under the same head as a supper-dish. They are made thus: scrape three or four ounces of lean ham, and an ounce or two of veal, and mix it with a pound of well-mashed potatoes; add salt, pepper, and a couple of eggs to bind, and mould into any shapes desired. They may be fried and served with or without gravy.
The first half of this entry is definition rather than instruction; the working recipe is the Munster loaves at the end, essentially a potato-and-meat croquette. A few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- What a croustade is hereNot a baked dish but a container: a shaped bread case, hollowed of crumb, fried crisp, blotted of fat and filled. Modern equivalents are vol-au-vent cases or fried bread cups, and the same rule applies -- fill them at the last moment or the crust softens.
- Mincemeat means minced meatIn this period "mincemeat" in a savoury context is finely chopped cooked meat in sauce, not the sweet fruit mixture. A ragout filling should be thick enough to hold a spoon upright, or it will soak straight through the case.
- Gratin, in the older senseThe gratin lining the Scottish potato moulds is a forcemeat -- pounded white meat of chicken or veal worked to a paste, not a cheese topping. A food processor will do the pounding.
- Scraping the hamScraping with a knife blade against the grain gives a fluffy shred that binds into the potato; chopping gives lumps that fall out during frying. Weigh the ham lean, 3-4 oz (85-115 g), against 1 lb (450 g) mashed potato.
- The potato must be dryThis is the hinge. Use a floury baking potato, baked or boiled whole in its skin and mashed while hot with no milk or butter, then left to steam off. Wet mash will not hold a shape and will spit in the fat.
- Two eggs is generousA pound of dry mash plus scraped meat usually binds with one egg and a yolk. Add the second egg only if the mixture crumbles when squeezed in the palm.
- Frying and the raw vealThe veal goes in raw, so keep the shapes small -- no more than about 2 in (5 cm) across and 1 in thick -- and fry at 340-350F until deep gold, roughly 4-5 minutes, so the centre reaches 165F. Flat cakes are safer than thick loaves here.
- Yield and servingThe stated quantities make about eight croquettes, enough for four as a supper dish. A well-reduced brown gravy or a mustard cream sauce suits them; the original leaves the gravy optional.
Croustades belong to the nineteenth-century kitchen's habit of building an edible vessel rather than washing another dish: stale bread, pastry, rice or potato was shaped, crisped and filled, and the technique let a small quantity of expensive meat look like a course. The entry's grouping of Scottish potato moulds and "Munster loaves" under the same head reflects that logic rather than any shared ancestry. The name Munster is not explained in the book and is not securely documented -- the word could as easily point to the Irish province or the Alsatian cheese as to any German town -- and English cookery writing of the era attached continental place-names to dishes loosely and often wrongly. What is certain is the household context: scraped ham ends, an ounce or two of veal and a pound of mashed potato is a recipe for using up what was left, and the original itself files it as a supper-dish rather than a dinner course.