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Fish Pate
Pick from the shell of a crab all that is good; pound it in a mortar with a small quantity of bread-crumbs, and a seasoning of white pepper, cayenne, salt, and nutmeg; add a very little gravy, which thicken with butter rolled in flour. Make it hot, and squeeze in a little lemon-juice. Have ready a wall of mashed potatoes round the inner rim of flat dish; let it be two and a half inches high. Smooth and ornament it with leaves, flowers, or according to taste; this can be done with a tin-cutter, and if egged and browned in the oven will have a very pretty appearance. Fill the center with the fricassee, and brown with a salamander. Small patties may be made, and filled with this fricassee. Time, one hour to prepare potatoes. Sufficient, one pound for three persons.
A dressed crab served inside a piped potato wall — Victorian "pâté" here means a filled case rather than a smooth spread. The recipe is workable as written once a few vessels and terms are translated.
- Quantities are left to youThe only measurement given is "one pound for three persons," and the recipe does not say whether the pound is potatoes or crab. For three people, the picked meat of a couple of medium crabs, brown and white together, will fill the dish.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle heated in the fire and held over food to brown the surface. A broiler/grill at high heat for 2-3 minutes does the same job; watch it, as the potato ridges catch quickly.
- "Add a very little gravy"Not meat gravy in the modern sense but a light stock or fish broth — a few tablespoons only. The mixture should hold its shape in a spoon, not run into the potato.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, then whisked into the hot liquid in small pieces. It thickens without the raw-flour taste of an unmade roux.
- Don't overheat the crabThe meat is already cooked. "Make it hot" means just that — bring the sauce to a bare simmer, fold in the crab, and stop. Prolonged cooking turns white meat stringy and dulls the flavour.
- Egged and brownedBrush the potato wall with beaten egg before it goes into the oven; the recipe gives no temperature, so use a hot oven only for as long as it takes to set and colour the surface. Build and bake the wall before filling the centre.
- Pounding in a mortarThe mortar broke down the picked meat with the crumbs; a short pulse in a food processor does the same job. The recipe pounds everything together, though you may prefer to keep some white meat back and fold it in whole for texture.
- The patty variationThe same filling in small pastry cases needs no potato wall; bake blind shells, fill hot, and glaze under the broiler just long enough to colour.
The word "p f2t f2" in the title is used in an older, broader sense: it shares a root with "pasty" and "patty" in the Old French *paste* (dough), and once commonly meant a filled case rather than the smooth forcemeat the word suggests today. Potato borders of this kind appear in English cookery of the period, piped or, as here, stamped into shapes with a tin cutter, egged and glazed. Crab was relatively cheap around much of the British coast, and a modest amount of meat could be dressed to fill a flat dish handsomely. The salamander named in the last line was standard kitchen equipment before enclosed ranges with overhead broilers made it redundant; the name survives on the professional gas units still called salamanders.