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Dresden Patties
For these patties, take off the outer crust of a stale French roll, divide the crumb into slices, and then into rounds, with a tin cutter. Make the slices sufficiently thick to allow of the middle being scooped out. Dip the croustades into milk, drain well, smear with egg, and cover with fine bread-raspings fried in butter to a pale brown colour. They are then filled with a compote of fruit, or they may be made savoury and filled with minced fowl, ham, and tongue, or with oysters, mushrooms, etc. Time to fry, five minutes.
A Victorian croustade: stale bread cut into cases, crumbed, browned, and filled. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the bread being properly stale — fresh crumb collapses into pulp the moment it meets milk.
- Use genuinely stale breadA day-or-two-old crusty white roll, dry enough to cut cleanly. A soft supermarket roll will not hold a scooped-out shape and will absorb far too much milk in the dip.
- Bread-raspingsThese are dried crumbs made from grated crust or oven-hardened bread — coarser and drier than fresh breadcrumbs, closest to modern dried breadcrumbs or panko. Frying them in butter to a pale brown before coating means the crust is already cooked and coloured.
- "Smear with egg"Beaten whole egg brushed over the milk-dampened surface. Drain the croustades well first, as the book says; a waterlogged case will not take an even egg coat and the crumbs will slide.
- The five minutesThe book gives a time but no temperature and does not say deep or shallow fat; moderately hot fat is the usual modern reading. Since the raspings are already browned, you are firming the case rather than colouring it -- go by structure, not colour, or the coating will darken past pale brown.
- Cook the fillings firstNothing in the recipe cooks the filling. The minced fowl, ham and tongue must be cooked and bound in a thick sauce beforehand; oysters need only a minute or two in their own liquor before being folded into a bechamel. The shells will not withstand a wet or raw filling.
- Sweet or savoury, not bothA compote filling means the case reads as dessert, so keep the raspings unsalted. For the savoury versions, season the frying butter and the crumbs.
- Fill at the last momentCroustades soften from the inside within minutes. Fry and drain in advance if you must, then warm briefly and fill just before they go to the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Slices thick enough to be scooped out mean one roll will only produce a handful of small cases, so scale the number of rolls to the number of guests.
Croustades — cases of fried or baked bread standing in for pastry — were a staple of nineteenth-century entremets and savouries, valued because they used up stale bread and could be filled with whatever the larder held, sweet or savoury, on the same afternoon. The "Dresden" label is often said to belong to a Victorian habit of attaching European city names to small, neat, decorative dishes rather than to any documented Saxon original. The suggested savoury fillings are telling: minced fowl, ham and tongue are precisely the cold remains of a large joint or a roast bird, and the whole recipe belongs to the tradition of making an elegant course out of yesterday's dinner. Tongue, then a routine item on the cold table, is the ingredient that has since become the exotic one.