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Game Patties
Make a nicely-flavoured mince of the remains of game. Moisten with a little gravy. Make some small round patties of good light crust, or puff paste, brush them over with beaten egg, and bake them till lightly browned. Warm the mince in a saucepan, put a little in the centre of each patty, and serve them hot, piled on a napkin. Time, ten minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1d. each, exclusive of the game. Sufficient, allow one for each person.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast game, and one that depends entirely on the pastry cases being crisp and the meat being warmed rather than cooked twice.
- "Patties" are pastry casesIn this book a patty is a small round shell of pastry, not a flattened cake of meat. Bake them as you would small vol-au-vents, either in patty tins or as free-standing rounds of puff paste with a smaller circle cut part-way through to lift out as a lid.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven heat, only the ten minutes. Puff paste wants a hot oven if it is to lift in that time; at a moderate heat the butter melts out before the layers set and the cases stay flat and greasy.
- Warming the minceThe hinge of the dish. The game is already cooked; bring it only to steaming point over low heat. Held at a simmer, reheated game meat turns dry and grainy in a few minutes.
- "A little gravy"Enough to bind, not to make a stew, roughly two tablespoons to a cup of chopped meat. Leftover roasting-tin gravy, well-reduced stock or a spoonful of demi-glace all work; the mixture should hold together on a spoon.
- Flavouring the mince"Nicely-flavoured" is left to the cook; comparable game-mince recipes of the period commonly call for salt, cayenne, a little pounded mace or nutmeg, and sometimes lemon juice or a spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Game benefits from more seasoning than the pastry suggests.
- Fill at the last momentFilling in advance softens the base. Bake, warm, fill and send out; the cases can be baked earlier in the day and crisped for a couple of minutes in the oven before serving.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin on the dish was the conventional way of sending up such things; it is generally said to absorb steam and to keep the pastry from sliding. A rack-cooled case on a warm plate does the same job if the ceremony does not appeal.
- Yield and place in the mealOne per person, as a small hot entrée or savoury rather than a main course. "1d. each" is the cost of the pastry alone, the point being that the game itself was already paid for.
"Patty" is generally taken to be an English alteration of the French pâté, and by the eighteenth century it had come to mean a small pastry case with a hot savoury filling; the "petty patties" of eighteenth-century English cookery are the same idea well over a century before Cassell's. The dish belongs to the very large class of Victorian re-made dishes, the ones built around "the remains of" a joint or bird, which fill a substantial part of any household dictionary of the period. Game in particular arrived in the kitchen in awkward quantities, whole birds sent as gifts from shooting estates or bought in season, and a cold pheasant or partridge picked over for its last shreds of meat was worth more dressed in puff paste than served sliced. The costing in pence per patty, exclusive of the game, is the book speaking directly to a mistress checking her cook's expenditure, and it tells you the pastry was the only thing anyone expected to buy.