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PODOVIES, OR BEEF PATTIES (another way)
Mince very finely two or three slices of under-done cold roast beef. Mix with the meat a third of its bulk in fat, and season with a little pepper and salt, and a finely-minced shallot, and, if the flavour is liked, an anchovy cut into small pieces. Prepare the patties according to the directions given in the preceding recipe, fill them with a tea-spoonful of the mince, and bake in a brisk oven. Serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Time, ten to fifteen minutes to bake. Probable cost, 2d. each. Sufficient, a dozen for a dish.
A Victorian way of using up the end of a roast: cold rare beef, minced fine, bound with its own fat and sharpened with shallot and anchovy, baked in small pastry cases. The whole point is that the filling is already cooked, so the oven only has to crisp the pastry.
- The hinge: keep the beef underdoneThe mince goes into the oven already cooked and comes out hot rather than cooked again. Use beef from a rare or medium-rare roast; well-done trimmings will be dry and grey after ten minutes at high heat.
- "A brisk oven"The book gives no temperature; 'brisk' conventionally means a hot oven, somewhere in the 400-450F range. Hot enough to set and colour the pastry in the ten to fifteen minutes given, which is all the time the filling needs.
- The patty casesThe "preceding recipe" is not reproduced here; Victorian patty cases of this kind were normally puff paste. In practice, a small tartlet tin lined with puff pastry, or shop-bought vol-au-vent cases, gives the same result.
- "A third of its bulk in fat"Measured by volume, not weight, and it means beef fat, trimmed from the joint and minced with the meat. If your roast came trimmed, beef suet or a spoonful of cold beef dripping does the job; the fat is what keeps the reheated mince moist.
- The anchovyVictorian anchovies were salt-packed and very strong. One modern oil-packed fillet, mashed rather than "cut into small pieces", is plenty for a dozen patties, and it should disappear into the beef as savour rather than read as fish.
- Seasoning cold minceTaste the filling before it goes in. Cold fat mutes salt, and once the patties are sealed and baked there is no adjusting it.
- Yield and servingA teaspoonful each makes the dozen the recipe calls a dish; the book does not say how many that feeds. The folded napkin was the standard way of presenting small fried and baked savouries; a warm plate does as well.
Podovies (also spelled podovis in nineteenth-century books) belong to the large family of Victorian made dishes built on yesterday's roast. The name is obscure; it has sometimes been linked, speculatively, to the Russian podovyi pirog, a hearth-baked pie, though no transmission into English cookery books has been documented. Cassell's simply files it among beef patties without comment. The anchovy is the period's signature trick, doing the work that Worcestershire sauce or stock reduction would do now, and the "probable cost, 2d. each" is a reminder that this dictionary was written for households keeping ledgers as carefully as menus.