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Patties, Preparation Of
Patties may either be baked in patty-pans or without them. They are usually made with puff-paste, and filled with savoury ingredients of various kinds. They should be baked in a brisk oven. If made in patty-pans, lightly grease the pans. Make the pastry according to the directions given for puff-paste, and roll it out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Line the moulds with this, fill them with flour, or place a crust of bread in the middle of them, put on the cover, trim the pastry even with the moulds, moisten the edges, press them together, and mark them with the prongs of a fork, or with scissors. Bake in a moderate oven. When done enough, raise the covers, take out the crusts, and return the patties to the oven for a minute or two to dry. Before serving, put the proper meat into the place where the bread has been. When made without moulds, roll out the paste as before, and cut it into an equal number of rounds, an inch and three-quarters in diameter. Place half of these on a buttered baking-tin, moisten the edges, place a tea-spoonful of the proper forcemeat in the centre of each, and cover it with another of the rounds, press the edges securely, brush them over with beaten egg, and bake in a brisk oven. Patties, whether served hot or cold, should be arranged on a folded napkin. Time to bake twelve to fifteen minutes. PATTY-PANS. (See illustration accompanying the article on ALMOND PUFFS.)
This is a method entry rather than a single dish: it teaches the two ways of building a puff-paste case, one lined into moulds and blind-baked, one assembled flat as a sealed round. The filling is treated as a separate matter, which is why no meat is specified.
- The oven contradictionThe entry says "brisk oven" twice and "moderate oven" once. Puff paste is normally baked hot so that steam lifts the layers before the butter runs out; the book gives no temperatures, so any modern figure is an inference rather than the book's own instruction.
- Flour or bread as blind-baking weightFilling the lined moulds with flour or a crust of bread keeps the sides from collapsing. Baking beans or rice in a parchment liner do the same job with less mess, but the bread crust has one advantage the entry relies on: it lifts out cleanly in one piece, leaving a dry hollow.
- Pastry thickness and round sizeA quarter of an inch is about 6 mm, thicker than most modern bakers roll puff paste, and correct here because the case must stand up on its own. The rounds for the version made without moulds are 1 3/4 inches, roughly 4.5 cm, giving a two-bite patty; scale up to 2 1/2 inches if you want them to hold a proper spoonful.
- ForcemeatPeriod forcemeat is a seasoned, bound mince, usually veal, chicken, oyster or game, worked with breadcrumbs, suet or butter and egg. Any modern well-seasoned mince or duxelles works, but keep it fairly dry: a wet filling steams the seam open in the flat version.
- Fill the moulded cases hot, at the last momentFill the moulded cases at the last moment -- The case is baked empty, dried out, and filled only before serving, so the filling must be cooked separately; the entry allows the patties to go to table hot or cold. Keeping the case dry inside matters either way, or it softens within minutes.
- Sealing the flat pattiesMoisten the edges and press them together first, as the entry directs, then brush over with beaten egg.
- Yield and timingTiming -- Twelve to fifteen minutes suits patties of the small size given.
- The folded napkinServing on a folded napkin was partly practical as well as conventional: it absorbs butter weeping from the pastry and stops the patties sliding on the dish. A paper doily or a rack over a warm plate does the same.
"Patty" comes into English from the French pâté, generally explained as an alteration of that word with the influence of "pasty," and at some point the word settled onto the little pastry case and the tin it was baked in rather than the meat inside. Cassell's, an alphabetical dictionary, keeps the entry among the P headwords with a cross-reference to ALMOND PUFFS, and the patty case was structural knowledge in a Victorian kitchen: once a cook could line a patty-pan and blind-bake it dry, a dozen dishes followed by simply changing what went in the hollow, from oyster to lobster to sweetbread to chicken. The technique sits in the same family as the vol-au-vent, generally traced to early nineteenth-century French pastry work, and it survives today mainly in canapé form. The instruction to serve on a folded napkin is a small marker of period service, where dishes went to table on sideboards and sauces and butters had to be caught somewhere.