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Meat Patties
Prepare the meat in the usual way, mince neatly and fill patty-pans lined with puff paste. Or, make a plain puff paste, roll thin, and form the patties like apple-puffs with the mince enveloped in the paste. Pinch the edges closely together, and fry a nice brown. Time, ten minutes to fry.
A short entry that assumes the reader already knows the house method for cooked minced meat — this is a way of using yesterday's roast, not a recipe for raw mince.
- "Prepare the meat in the usual way""Prepare the meat in the usual way" is not explained here; it most probably points to already-cooked meat — cold roast beef, mutton or veal, trimmed and chopped fine, then bound with a little thick gravy or brown sauce and seasoned. A cooked, cold filling needs only reheating, which fits the short frying time given.
- The hinge: a cold, stiff fillingThe mince should be moist enough to taste of something but stiff enough to hold its shape when cold — roughly the consistency of thick porridge. A wet filling steams inside the paste, blows the seams open in the fat and floods the pan.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tartlet tins, about 2 to 2.5 inches across. A twelve-hole mini muffin or tartlet tray is the nearest modern equivalent. Note that the only cooking instruction given is to fry, and it follows the second, folded method; the recipe does not say how the lined pans were to be cooked.
- "Plain puff paste"Probably a less rich paste than full puff — a rough puff or flaky pastry; Victorian cookery books commonly distinguished pastes by richness. All-butter shop-bought puff works, but roll it thinner than you think, about 1/8 inch, or the fried parcel is doughy in the middle.
- If you bake the lined versionIf you choose to bake the lined version -- The book gives neither a baking instruction nor a temperature. If baking, a hot oven — around 425F — for 20 to 25 minutes, until the paste is set and coloured, works; a slow oven leaves puff paste greasy and flat.
- Frying the folded onesDeep fat at 350 to 360F. Ten minutes is longer than most modern cooks would give them; at that temperature the paste is brown and cooked in about five to seven minutes, since the filling only needs reheating. Fry a single one first and cut it open to judge.
- SealingDamp the edges with water before pinching, and press with a fork or crimp firmly. An unsealed edge in hot fat is the usual cause of a burst patty.
- YieldAbout a pound of cooked meat and a pound of pastry gives roughly a dozen small patties — a first course or a supper dish for four.
Meat patties belong to the Victorian economy of the cold larder: a large joint was roasted, served hot, then served cold, and what remained was minced and re-dressed. The entry names no particular meat, the method being meant to be applied to whatever the household happened to have — the same logic behind rissoles, croquettes and shepherd's pie. The word patty here is the older English sense, a small pie or pasty (from the French pâté), not the flat cake of ground meat the word now means in American usage. The comparison to "apple-puffs" is telling: the fried turnover shape was familiar enough in sweet form that the compiler could describe the savoury version in a few words and expect to be understood.