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Ham and Chicken Patties
Line as many small patty-pans as you require with puff-paste. Lay a crust of bread in each, put on the lid, brush over with well-beaten egg, and bake them in a quick oven, until delicately browned. While they are baking, take some ham and chicken, previously finely minced, and freed from sinew and skin. Of this, two-thirds should be chicken, and one-third ham. Flavour nicely with grated lemon-rind, salt, and cayenne. Put the meat into a saucepan, with good gravy sufficient to moisten it, squeeze over it a few drops of lemon-juice, and when the patties are sufficiently baked, cut off the top, remove the bread, put in a little of the mince, place the lid over it, and serve, piled on a hot napkin, and garnished according to taste. Time, a quarter of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 3d. each. One pound of flour and three-quarters of a pound of butter will make sufficient paste for two dozen patties.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast chicken and boiled ham, built on a puff-paste shell baked blind with a crust of bread standing in for baking beans. The pastry and the filling are made separately and married at the last moment.
- The hinge: fill at the last secondThe cases are baked empty and the hot mince goes in as they come out of the oven. Filled early, the pastry base turns to paste; this is a dish assembled and carried to the table in the same few minutes.
- Quick ovenConventionally taken today as somewhere around 425-450F (220-230C), though the book gives no temperature. Puff paste needs a high heat to throw its layers before the butter melts out. The recipe's quarter of an hour suits small cases at that sort of heat.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tartlet or bun tins, not deep muffin cups; the recipe specifies only that they be small. A standard tartlet tray works.
- The crust of breadA piece of stale bread acts as the blind-baking weight and keeps the case from collapsing; the lid of pastry sits on top of it. Baking beans and a paper lining do the same job, though the bread has the advantage of holding the lid up at the correct height.
- The pasteOne pound of flour to three-quarters of a pound of butter is a butter-heavy paste, though lighter than a classic puff of equal weights; the recipe says it makes two dozen small cases. Bought all-butter puff pastry substitutes, but allow for the fact that the original quantities make a good deal more than 500g of dough, and the cases here need lids as well as bases.
- "Good gravy"Generally the reduced, well-seasoned meat stock or jus of the period rather than a heavily thickened brown sauce. Concentrated chicken stock reduced until faintly sticky gives the right effect: enough to bind the mince, not enough to make it wet.
- Heat the mince, do not cook itThe method assumes both meats are already cooked (cold roast fowl and boiled ham). On that assumption, bring the mixture just to a bare simmer to warm through; boiling it dries the chicken into threads and drives off the lemon. If the chicken is not already cooked, it must be cooked through properly first.
- SeasoningCayenne here means a genuine sharp pinch, and the grated lemon rind is the point of the dish, not a garnish. Salt lightly at first, as the ham carries a good deal already.
- Yield and servingTwenty-four small patties, enough for eight to twelve as a first course or savoury. The "hot napkin" is a folded linen cloth on the serving dish, which absorbs butter and keeps the bases from sliding.
Patties of this kind were a fixture of the late-Victorian second course and supper table, and their real purpose was economy: they turn the last shreds of a roast fowl and the end of a ham into something that looks like a made dish, with the ham serving as seasoning as much as meat. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium of the 1870s onward, prices nearly everything it describes, and the note of "3d. each" is aimed squarely at the mistress of a middle-class household working out whether a dish was worth the trouble. Bread used in place of a lining and weights turns up elsewhere in English cookery writing; it costs nothing and can be eaten afterwards by whoever is in the kitchen.