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Sweet Patties
Sweet patties may be made of various ingredients, and in a variety of ways (see PATTIES, PREPARATION OF). The mince to fill them will be excellent if made as follows. Take the meat of a boiled calf's-foot--one which has been stewed down for stock may be utilised in this way--drain it well, mince it finely, and mix with it a table-spoonful of finely-shredded suet, three apples, pared, cored, and chopped small, a spoonful of candied peel chopped small, the pounded yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, the strained juice of a lemon, and a little of the grated rind: sugar to taste, and add a small glassful of wine. Put this mince into pastry, and bake the patties in the usual way.
This is a wet, gelatinous mincemeat rather than the long-keeping jarred kind, and it is designed to use up a calf's foot already spent on stock. A few conversions and one structural note will get it into a modern oven.
- The calf's footA boiled calf's foot yields only a few ounces of soft, sticky meat and skin, heavily set with gelatin. Butchers and halal or Caribbean markets still sell them; if you cannot get one, the closest substitute in texture is the meat picked from a boiled pig's trotter. It can be left out altogether, with more apple and suet in its place, though that gives an ordinary meatless mincemeat rather than the dish as written.
- Drain it well means cool it firstDrain it well -- The recipe asks only that the meat be drained, but chilling helps: warm foot meat is slippery and hard to mince finely, and it carries liquid stock that will soak the pastry. Chill it until the gelatin is firm, then chop it fine and let the mixture stand cold before filling.
- SuetA tablespoon of shredded suet, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 oz. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works directly; if starting from a lump of raw kidney suet, freeze it briefly and grate it.
- A small glassful of wineIn Cassell's period a wine glass is about 2 fl oz. Sherry, madeira or a sweet white are all in keeping. Because there is no long maceration here, alcohol stays noticeable, so err on the low side.
- Sugar to tasteThree apples and a lemon's juice need a fair amount: start at 3 tablespoons and taste the cold mixture. The candied peel is also sweet, so add it before judging.
- Pastry and vesselThe recipe refers the reader to a separate entry not reproduced here. In this period a patty was a small, shallow pastry case rather than the deep dish the word suggests today; small tartlet tins or a shallow bun tin will do.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven guidance beyond "the usual way." For pastry of this size a hot oven, around 425F, for 15-20 minutes, until the pastry is set and coloured, suits. The foot meat and egg yolks are already cooked, but the apples and suet are not, so the bake has to cook the filling as well as the crust.
- YieldThe quantity given fills about 12 small patties. They are best warm on the day they are made; the gelatin in the filling stiffens noticeably once cold.
- Seasoning the Victorians assumedSeasoning -- No spice is specified. Mincemeat recipes of the period commonly take nutmeg, cinnamon or mixed spice, and a quarter-teaspoon of each would not be out of keeping if the filling tastes flat.
Sweet patties belong to the long life of English mincemeat as a genuine meat preparation. Medieval and early modern "minced pies" combined chopped meat, suet, dried fruit, sugar and spice in one pastry, and the meat only quietly dropped out by degrees over the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, leaving suet as its last trace in the mincemeat sold today. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households running on economy as much as on ambition, keeps the older form and gives it a specifically thrifty turn: the calf's foot named here is one already boiled down for stock, its gelatin extracted, its picked meat otherwise waste. The calf's foot itself was a workhorse of the period, valued for the setting power that gave Victorian kitchens their jellies and glazes before commercial gelatine was cheap and reliable.