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Ham and Egg Patties
Take a stale quartern loaf, remove the crust, and cut the crumb into slices about an inch and a half thick. Stamp these into rounds as large as the top of an egg-cup, and make a little incision with the point of a sharp knife all round inside each ring, half an inch from the edge. Fry these pieces of bread in hot fat till lightly browned, scrape out the middle, put a dessert-spoonful of minced ham in each, prepared as in the last recipe, and place a poached egg on the top of each. Time, three or four minutes to fry the bread. Probable cost, 3d. each. A quartern loaf will make a dozen patties.
A fried bread case — what Victorian kitchens called a croustade — filled with minced ham and topped with a poached egg. The whole thing depends on the bread being stale enough to hold its shape in hot fat.
- A quartern loafA quartern loaf is a four-pound loaf, the standard large domestic loaf of the period. A modern 1.5–2 lb sandwich loaf, unsliced, will give you four to six patties rather than a dozen; buy two if you want the full yield.
- Bread must be genuinely staleFresh crumb collapses and drinks fat. Day-old to two-day-old white bread, cut a full inch and a half thick, is what holds a wall thick enough to scoop out. A firm open-crumb loaf works better than a soft pan loaf.
- Size the rounds for the egg, not the egg-cupA Victorian egg-cup rim is generally around two inches across, which makes a narrow base for a poached egg. Cutting rounds 2.5 to 3 inches in diameter, and scoring the inner ring half an inch in as directed, gives the case a wider rim for the egg to sit on.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 350–375F gives the three to four minutes stated. Cooler than that and the bread soaks; hotter and the outside colours before the interior sets firm enough to hollow out.
- Hollow them hotScrape out the centres as soon as they come from the fat and drain them upside down on paper. Cold fried bread turns brittle and the middle tears out in chunks rather than lifting cleanly along the scored line.
- The minced ham"Prepared as in the last recipe" points to a page this extract does not include, so the exact preparation cannot be checked. A usual treatment for minced ham in books of this period is lean cooked ham minced fine, bound with a little thick white sauce or cream, and seasoned with pepper, mustard or cayenne; the ham is generally salty enough without extra salt. Warm it through before filling.
- PoachingThree minutes in barely simmering water with a splash of vinegar sets the white and leaves the yolk soft, which is the point — it dresses the ham as you cut in. Trim the ragged edges before setting the egg on the case.
- Yield and servingA dozen patties from a quartern loaf; count two per person for a light supper or breakfast dish. They must be assembled at the last moment and served immediately, or the fried bread softens under the egg. The "3d. each" is late-Victorian pricing, of no use now beyond showing this was a thrifty way to stretch cooked ham.
"Patty" here means a small case rather than a flat cake of meat — the same sense as patty-pan and patty-shell — and the fried-bread version is a cheap stand-in for puff pastry or a hollowed dinner roll, what French cookery calls a croustade. Cassell's, a late nineteenth-century household dictionary aimed at middle-class kitchens with a servant or two, is full of these constructions: a stale loaf, a few ounces of leftover cooked ham and an egg become a dish presentable at breakfast, luncheon or a supper table. The frugality is deliberate. Bread was the one thing every household had going hard, and frying it in dripping turned a waste product into something that could carry a sauce, which is the same logic behind fried bread croûtes under game and the sippets served with soup throughout the period.