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Rayleigh Toast
Chop a small onion and fry it brown; add a seasoning of mixed herbs, salt, and pepper, a tea-spoonful of grated cocoa-nut, the same of curry-paste, a table-spoonful of sherry, and one of stock. Let these boil, stirring constantly, and adding a little more stock as required; the mixture should just drop from the spoon easily. Then put in four ounces of cooked rabbit, four ounces of cooked ham and tongue mixed, and a hard-boiled egg, all chopped very small. Reheat, and serve on rounds of bread, fried, and cut into triangles.
A late-Victorian hot savoury: a thick, curried mince of leftover meats bound in a small amount of stock and piled on fried bread. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the meat is chopped.
- The hinge is the consistency"Just drop from the spoon easily" means a thick, spoonable paste, not a sauce. If it is loose it will soak the fried bread within a minute of plating; reduce it further before the meat goes in, since reheating chopped cooked meat in a wet mixture only dries the meat out.
- Curry-pasteNot curry powder. Victorian curry paste was a cooked, oily concentrate of spices, and any jarred Madras or Bengal-style curry paste stands in well. A teaspoon is a background note here, not the dominant flavour.
- Grated cocoa-nutMost likely fresh grated coconut. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works if you soak it briefly in the warm stock first; sweetened flake will throw the balance out entirely.
- Rabbit, ham and tongueAll three are leftovers in the original economy of the dish. Rabbit is available from good butchers but a poached chicken thigh substitutes without complaint. Ox tongue is now a specialist buy; doubling the ham, or using ham plus a little cooked bacon or salt beef, keeps the salty-sweet contrast the recipe is after.
- SaltHam, tongue and curry paste are all salted already. Season the onion base lightly and taste only after the meat has gone in.
- Chopped very smallHand-chop rather than pulse in a processor. The dish depends on distinguishable flecks of egg, ham and rabbit; a machine turns it to paste in seconds.
- StockStart with a tablespoon, as directed, and add by the spoonful. The recipe gives no total; in practice a few tablespoons is usually enough for this quantity of meat, and you stop when the mixture just drops from the spoon.
- The toastRounds of bread fried in fat, then cut into triangles. The original's word order ('fried, and cut into triangles') suggests cutting after frying, which also keeps the edges crisp. Fry them last and assemble just before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Eight ounces of meat plus the egg will make roughly six to eight small savouries.
Hot savouries — anchovy, marrow, devilled roes, curried scraps on fried bread — closed the formal English dinner between the sweet course and dessert, a course that survived in clubs and dining rooms well into the twentieth century and then largely vanished. Their purpose was practical as much as ceremonial: a small, sharp, salty mouthful said to settle the palate before port. This one belongs to the large family of Anglo-Indian kitchen inventions that put curry paste and coconut to work on the previous day's cold joint, a habit well established in British domestic cookery by the later nineteenth century. Named toasts of this kind, attached to place-names, are common in the household cookery books of the period.