Home › The Principles of Cookery › Shrimp Patties
Shrimp Patties
Make some rich pastry and cut it into small squares; lay on it some picked shrimps, well seasoned with cayenne; fold over and bake for ten minutes. When rearly done, brush over with the yolk of an egg, sift a little vermicelli on top, and arrange neatly on a hot dish. Garnish with cut lemon and parsley.
A Victorian savoury turnover, written for a cook who already knew how pastry behaves. Two things in the original need decoding: the missing oven temperature and the vermicelli.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; domestic ranges of the period were judged by hand and experience rather than by dial. Small rich-pastry parcels are best baked hot, in the region of 400-425F, so the fat sets before the shrimp overcook — but the original specifies nothing on this point.
- Ten minutes is optimisticTen minutes may be short -- Small squares of shortcrust or rough puff can want 15-20 minutes at that heat to colour through and cook the base, and the recipe's own "when nearly done" implies further time after the glaze. The filling is already cooked, so bake to the pastry, not the shrimp.
- The vermicelliThis is dried vermicelli pasta crushed to coarse crumbs and sifted over the egg-washed top, giving a crisp speckled crust. It is not the sugar-strand vermicelli of cake decorating, and not the modern rice noodle.
- Egg wash timing"When nearly done, brush over with the yolk" only works if the pastry then gets long enough to set the glaze and toast the vermicelli. Glaze and crumb about five minutes before the end, or glaze before baking for a more even finish.
- Picked shrimpsSmall cooked brown shrimp, peeled -- "picked" means shelled, not cleaned of grit. Peeled cooked cold-water shrimp are the nearest supermarket substitute; chop larger prawns so the parcels close properly.
- CayenneThe original asks only for shrimps "well seasoned with cayenne" and gives no quantity; season to taste. The cut lemon of the garnish can be squeezed over as well as looked at.
- SealingDamp the edges and press firmly, and cut a small vent. Shrimp release liquid as they warm and an unsealed parcel leaks onto the tray.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a rough working guide, about a pound of pastry and 8 oz of picked shrimp would make roughly a dozen small patties — four as a first course, more as part of a spread.
"Patty" in nineteenth-century English cookery covers almost anything small baked in pastry; the word is usually traced to French pâté, and the patty-pans such things were often shaped in take their name from the patty rather than the other way about. Shrimp was cheap, reached inland markets already boiled and often already potted, and needed only seasoning and a wrapper. Brown shrimp from the Lancashire and Norfolk coasts were a standard article, commonly sold picked, by the pint. Dressing the top with crushed vermicelli is a period trick for getting texture and a bit of visual interest onto plain pastry without icing or sugar.