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Rolls, Meat
Mince some underdone meat--beef, veal, chicken, or turkey--and pound it smoothly with a third of its weight in fresh butter and a liberal seasoning of pepper and salt. Make some good forcemeat, and form it into small rolls about three inches long and half an inch thick. Moisten these with water, and cover with one or two layers of the pounded meat. Fold them in puff-paste, fasten the ends securely, and bake in a well-heated oven. Serve them piled on a neatly-folded napkin. The forcemeat may be made as follows. Mix a quarter of a tea-spoonful of finely-minced lemon-rind with four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Add salt and pepper, a pinch of grated nutmeg, and a quarter of an ounce of mixed sweet herbs finely powdered. Break into the mixture two ounces of sweet butter, moisten with the yolk of an egg, and work lightly with the fingers till it is well mixed. Time to bake the rolls, twenty minutes.
A Victorian way with cold roast meat: a seasoned forcemeat core, a coat of pounded meat, and a puff-paste jacket. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the pastry seal.
- Seal the ends properlyThe butter in the pounded meat melts and will run out of any gap, leaving the pastry soggy underneath and the filling dry. Press the seams and ends firmly, chill the assembled rolls 20 minutes before baking, and set them seam-side down.
- "Well-heated oven"The book gives no temperature; for puff paste this is usually taken as a hot oven, in the region of 425-450F. A cooler oven lets the butter in the pastry leak before the layers set, and twenty minutes may not be enough to colour it.
- "Underdone meat"Leftover rare roast beef, veal, or the breast of a roast chicken or turkey. It is meant to be already cooked but pink, so it does not overcook in the second baking. Trim gristle and skin before mincing.
- PoundingThe mortar work is a food processor job now: pulse the meat with the butter to a smooth paste. Keep everything cold or the butter splits and the coating will not hold together around the forcemeat.
- Butter proportionsA third of the meat's weight is a lot of butter by modern taste, and it is what makes the paste spreadable. For eight ounces of meat that is about 2⅔ ounces; if you want it leaner, two ounces (a quarter) is about as far as you can go before the paste stops holding together.
- "Sweet butter" and "sweet herbs"Sweet butter is simply unsalted. Sweet herbs are the mild kitchen herbs: parsley, thyme, marjoram, a little sage. Dried and finely powdered, a quarter ounce is somewhere around one to two tablespoons depending on how fine the powder is.
- Reheating cooked meatThe filling starts cold and cooked. Twenty minutes at a high temperature should carry the centre well past 165F, but check the first one if your rolls are thicker than the specified three inches by half an inch.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; four ounces of crumbs makes forcemeat for roughly a dozen rolls of the stated size, perhaps more. The folded napkin is period presentation.
Meat rolls of this kind belong to the long English tradition of the made dish, in which cold roast meat from a large joint was rebuilt into something that could be served as a fresh course rather than as obvious leftovers. The economy is plain enough: a household roasting a sirloin or a turkey expected several days of dishes from it, and pounding meat to a paste with butter, then encasing it, disguised both the cutting and the age of the meat. The forcemeat here, with lemon rind, nutmeg and sweet herbs bound with breadcrumbs and egg yolk, is essentially the same mixture used to stuff veal and poultry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and pounded meat and butter under pastry is a close relative of potted meats and of the pies sold by pastrycooks. The napkin, folded and piled with hot rolls, was a common way of serving things fried or baked in paste.