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Patties, Fried Bread
Cut three or four slices, an inch and a half thick, from a stale quartern loaf. That called by bakers a sandwich loaf answers excellently for the purpose. Cut the slices into rounds an inch and three-quarters in diameter, and make a tolerably deep incision at one end, a quarter of an inch from the edge, to mark the lid and the part which is afterwards to be scooped out for the admission of the meat. Fry the bread in plenty of boiling fat or dripping until it is lightly browned all over, drain it from the fat, take off the top, and remove the crumb from the middle, and put in its place the prepared meat. Serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Fry until the patties are equally and lightly browned all over. Time to fry, about twelve minutes. Probable cost of cases, 1d. each. Sufficient, a dozen for a dish.
These are croustades — fried bread cases used in place of pastry for a hot savoury filling. The recipe is really a set of dimensions plus a frying instruction, and both need translating.
- Quartern loafA quartern loaf took its name from a quartern of flour — a quarter of a peck, about 3½ lb — giving a loaf of roughly 4 lb, much larger than a modern tin loaf. Any close-crumbed white sandwich loaf works; you need slices a full inch and a half thick, so buy it unsliced.
- Stale is not optionalFresh bread collapses and drinks fat. Bread a day or two old, or slices left uncovered for a few hours, holds the cylinder shape and scoops cleanly.
- Cutting the casesA 1¾-inch plain round cutter gives the outside; press a smaller cutter about a quarter-inch inside the rim to a depth of roughly half the slice. That scored disc lifts off as the lid after frying.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means fat hot enough to fry briskly, roughly 350–375F. Much below that the bread saturates; much above and the outside colours before the centre firms.
- The twelve minutesTwelve minutes at a brisk frying heat risks over-browning the bread. Expect nearer two to four minutes, turning once, until an even pale gold. The stated time may reflect much cooler dripping in a shallow pan; judge by colour, not the clock.
- DrainingDrain hollow side down on paper or a rack, then hold uncovered in a low oven. Anything that traps steam softens the crust you just built.
- Fill at the last minuteThe cases go soggy within minutes of meeting a moist filling, so have the mince, salpicon or creamed mixture hot and spoon it in as the dish goes to the table.
- YieldA dozen cases for a dish, as stated; the recipe reckons three or four slices will supply them, so three or four rounds cut from each slice.
Fried bread cases belong to a nineteenth-century repertoire of small hot entrées, in which — so it is often said — a fashionable French kitchen would reach for a puff-pastry vol-au-vent and a domestic English one economise with the loaf. The word usually attached to them, croustade, is generally glossed as a crust made to hold something, and the same technique appears in period cookery with hollowed rolls and even hollowed potatoes. Cassell's cheerful note that the cases cost a penny each is the point of the entry: the dish looks like a made dish of pastry, requires no pastrycook's hand, and uses up bread that has gone dry. That the filling is left entirely unspecified is characteristic of the Dictionary's method — the case is a vehicle, and the reader is expected to look up the mince, salpicon or ragout separately.