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Cheese Patties
Line some tartlet tins with good puff paste, and half fill them with a mixture made thus. Put a quarter of a pound of cheese, cut into small pieces, in a mortar with a pinch of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, half a tea-spoonful of raw mustard, and a piece of butter the size of an egg. Pound it smoothly, and add, by degrees, the well-beaten yolks of three eggs, and a table-spoonful of sherry. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and just before the patties are to be baked add the white of an egg beaten to a solid froth. Bake in a quick oven. Time, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each. Allow one for each person.
A hot cheese custard baked in puff pastry cases — closer to a small soufflé than to a quiche. The instruction that matters is to half fill the cases and get them into the oven the moment the egg white goes in.
- Quick ovenRead this as 425–450F (220–230C). The pastry needs that heat to rise and set before the filling swells over the rim; a moderate oven gives you soggy cases and a flat filling.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz / 55 g. Victorian eggs were generally smaller than today's graded ones, so err on the smaller side rather than the larger.
- Raw mustardDry mustard powder, unmixed — not prepared table mustard. Half a teaspoon is correct for this quantity and is what carries the cheese flavour.
- PepperHalf a teaspoon of pepper in a quarter pound of cheese is assertive by modern taste. Start with a quarter teaspoon of freshly ground if you would rather taste the cheese and the sherry.
- The mortarA food processor does this in seconds. Cheese, salt, pepper, mustard and butter to a smooth paste first, then the yolks in a slow trickle, then the sherry. The mixture should be thick enough to mound on a spoon.
- Cheese to useA firm, dry, well-flavoured cheese — mature Cheddar, Cheshire, or Gruyère. Anything soft or high-moisture will loosen the mixture and weep in the oven.
- Timing the egg whiteFold the whipped white in at the last possible moment and bake immediately, as the recipe directs. If the mixture stands, the froth subsides and the patties bake denser.
- Yield and servingA quarter pound of cheese with three yolks fills roughly ten to twelve standard tartlet tins. Serve within minutes of leaving the oven, as a savoury course or with drinks; they sink as they cool.
History: This belongs to the family of small hot savouries -- the little cheese, anchovy or marrow tartlets served at the end of a formal English dinner after the sweets. The technique is pure pre-mixer kitchen: cheese and butter pounded to a paste in a mortar, bound with yolks, then lightened with a beaten white, which is the same logic as a cheese souffle scaled down to a mouthful. The costing of "1 1/2d. each" is characteristic of the book's late-nineteenth-century readership.