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Pork Crepinettes
Make some plain potato pastry with mashed potatoes and flour, and cut it into little rounds. Cut half the number of slices of tomato or onion, and half the number of slices of pork. On half the potato rounds put a slice of tomato or onion, season with salt, pepper, and mustard or chutney, then add the meat, and another slice of vegetable seasoned in the same way. Cover with the rest of the potato rounds, and press the edges well together. Then egg and bread-crumb them, and fry in hot fat to a nice brown. Probable cost, 2d. each.
A frugal cutlet in disguise: slices of pork sealed between rounds of potato pastry, crumbed and fried. The original assumes the pork is already cooked, which is the point on which the whole dish turns.
- Use cooked porkThe recipe does not say whether the slices are raw or cooked. Frying browns the crumb crust in a few minutes, which is nowhere near long enough to cook raw pork sealed inside pastry. Use cold cooked pork sliced thin, or if starting from raw, cook the slices through first (to 145F, rested) before assembling.
- Potato pastry proportionsNo quantities are given. A workable dough is roughly 2 parts dry mashed potato to 1 part flour by weight, with salt and enough beaten egg to bind. Use floury potatoes, mashed without milk or butter, or the dough turns slack and will not hold a seal.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about 1/4 inch thick on a well-floured board and cut with a 2 1/2 to 3 inch cutter. Potato dough tears more readily than short pastry, so chill it for half an hour before rolling.
- SealingPress the edges firmly and, if they resist, brush with a little water or egg first. A leak lets fat into the filling and steam out of it, and the parcel opens in the pan.
- Frying fatFor "hot fat," shallow or deep frying at about 350-375F works. Below that the potato absorbs grease; above it the crumb darkens before the inside is hot through. Three to four minutes a side is enough to brown and heat.
- Chutney and mustardVictorian chutneys were not standardised and varied widely, but a modern chutney is a fair substitution. Use it sparingly: too much wet relish inside the parcel softens the pastry from within.
- Yield and servingThe recipe scales by the round. Reckon two or three per person as a light main course with a green salad or brown gravy; the probable cost of tuppence each is given, as it is throughout the book.
A true crépinette is a flat sausage cake wrapped in crépine, the lacy caul fat from a pig's abdomen, which bastes and holds the mixture as it cooks. Here the name is applied loosely, to a pork slice sealed in potato pastry rather than membrane. The dish sits comfortably in the reheated-joint tradition, and potato pastry made from the previous day's mash was among the cheapest available wrappers. The stated cost of twopence each, and the instruction to use half as many slices of meat as of pastry rounds, indicate plainly what the recipe is for.