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Prawn Patties
Shell three dozen prawns, and pound them in a mortar, adding by degrees half an ounce of butter, a table-spoonful of cream, a dessert-spoonful of anchovy paste, and the yolk of an egg; season with cayenne, and mix thoroughly. Roll some good paste out rather thinly, stamp out some rounds with a two-inch cutter; put about a tea-spoonful of the mixture in the centre of half the number of rounds; wet the edges, place the other pieces of paste one on the top of each; press down the edges, then brush over with egg, crumb them, and fry in hot fat to a golden colour. Drain, serve up in a circle on a hot dish, and garnish with fried parsley.
A late-Victorian fried savoury pastry, closer to a small sealed turnover than the open shells the word "patty" suggests today. The whole thing depends on a tight seal and hot fat.
- Seal the edges properlyThis is the hinge. Wet the rim thoroughly, press with a fork or the back of a smaller cutter, and chill the assembled rounds for 20 minutes before crumbing. Any gap and the filling weeps into the fat and the patty collapses.
- Quantities and yieldThree dozen shelled prawns is roughly 8-10 oz (225-280 g) of picked meat. The recipe does not say how many rounds to cut, but at a teaspoonful of filling per patty this quantity of mixture will fill considerably more than a dozen and a half.
- Old spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons; the Victorian tablespoon is close enough to the modern one. Anchovy paste at two teaspoons for this quantity of prawn is assertive but correct - it is doing the seasoning work along with the cayenne.
- "Good paste"The recipe does not specify which; a rich shortcrust is the likelier reading for something sealed and deep-fried. Roll it thin, about 1/8 inch; a thick round fries to a hard shell before the middle warms through.
- The mortarA food processor does this in seconds, but pulse rather than run it - prawn worked to a smooth paste loses all texture. Add the butter, cream and yolk gradually as instructed, or the mixture splits and turns loose.
- FryingThe recipe says only "hot fat"; deep fat at 350-360F (175-180C) suits it. Shelled prawns of the period were generally sold boiled, so the frying is mainly colouring the crumb and cooking the pastry - two to three minutes, turning once. Hotter and the crust browns before the pastry sets.
- Anchovy paste todayModern anchovy paste is strongly salted. Taste the filling before you fill anything and hold back on any extra salt.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs completely and drop them into the fat for a few seconds only, after the patties are out. Wet parsley in hot fat spits violently.
The patty of Victorian cookery books is a small enclosed pastry, from the French pâté in its older sense of something wrapped in crust, and by the 1890s the word covered everything from oyster patties in puff cases to these crumbed and fried rounds. Prawns were a staple of the English savoury course and the shrimp and prawn fisheries of the Thames estuary, Morecambe Bay and the Norfolk coast supplied them potted, shelled and boiled in quantity. Anchovy paste - Gentleman's Relish and its many rivals - was the standard Victorian way of giving fish dishes depth without stock, and it turns up in a good many potted-shrimp and fish-sauce recipes of the period. Cassell's directs that the patties be handed round in a circle on a hot dish.