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SHRIMP PATTIES (another way)
Line some patty-pans with puff-paste about half an inch thick, bake in a quick oven till brown, and fill with the following mixture. Shell and chop a pint of shrimps; put them into a stewpan with an ounce of flour, two ounces of butter, and a quarter of a pint of cream, season with cayenne pepper and a few drops of lemon-juice. When just on boiling point, take up and fill the pans, then put a lid of pastry on each, re-heat, and serve garnished with small sprigs of parsley.
A Victorian hot hors d'oeuvre: puff-paste cases filled with a shrimp cream. The whole thing hinges on not cooking the shrimp twice.
- A quick ovenUsually taken to mean somewhere in the region of 400-450F; the book gives no figure. Puff paste needs the high initial heat to lift; a moderate oven will leave the layers greasy and slack.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tartlet or muffin tins, roughly 2-2.5 inches across. Line them, prick the bases, and bake with weights or the pastry will dome and leave no room for filling. Cut a separate round for each lid and bake those flat on a sheet.
- A pint of shrimpsA volume measure, and as the recipe words it the pint is measured before shelling: "shell and chop a pint of shrimps". Expect appreciably less than a pint of shelled meat from it. The book means small brown or pink shrimps, already boiled, of the kind sold potted; cooked cocktail shrimp are the nearest modern equivalent.
- The shrimp are already cookedThe pan stage is only to make and thicken the sauce and warm the shrimp through. Bringing them anywhere near a rolling boil, and then re-heating in the oven, turns them to rubber. Make the sauce first, fold the chopped shrimp in at the end, and take it off the heat as soon as it steams.
- Order of operations in the stewpanAs written the flour, butter and cream go in together. It works better to melt the butter, cook the flour in it for a minute, then whisk in the cream. A quarter of an imperial pint is 5 fluid ounces, nearer two-thirds of a US cup than a half; with an ounce of flour the result is very thick, which is what you want for a filling that must sit in pastry.
- CayenneCayenne was a common Victorian seasoning for shellfish. A generous pinch is in keeping; taste as you go and finish with the lemon juice off the heat.
- The re-heatingFilled cases go back into a hot oven for five minutes at most, just to warm the lids through. Longer and the filling breaks and the pastry softens from beneath.
- YieldEnough for roughly a dozen small patties, served as a first course or a savoury with drinks. They are at their best within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
History: Patties in this sense are generally taken to be the English descendants of the French petits pâtés — small pastry cases with a savoury filling — and by the late nineteenth century they were a fixture of the supper table and the ball buffet, made with oysters, lobster, chicken or, most cheaply, shrimps. Cassell's gives several versions because the form was so useful: the cases could be baked in the morning and filled at the last moment. The shrimps themselves would have been the tiny brown shrimps landed in quantity along the English coast and sold ready-boiled by the pint, a market measure rather than a kitchen weight, which is why the recipe asks for volume. The same shrimps, packed under clarified butter with mace and cayenne, produced potted shrimp — the seasoning here, cayenne and lemon, is essentially the potting mixture in sauce form.