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Veal Patties, Fried
Mince half a pound of cooked lean veal and a quarter of a pound of ham. Season the mince with salt, cayenne, grated lemon-rind, and grated nutmeg, and mix with it an egg boiled hard and chopped small. Moisten with nicely-flavoured stock that forms a strong jelly when cold, and add a little cream. Roll some good pastry to the thickness of half a crown. Put upon this little mounds of the mince an inch distant from each other. Place a piece of pastry over all, and stamp the covered mounds out in patties with a round cutter. Moisten the edges, and press the pastry together round the mince. When wanted, drop the patties into hot fat and fry them till they are lightly browned. Drain them, and serve on a neatly-folded napkin garnished with parsley. If preferred, the patties may be baked in a moderate oven instead of being fried. Time to fry the patties, a quarter of an hour.
A made dish for using up cooked veal, built like a small sealed turnover rather than the modern open pastry case. Two things in the original need adjusting: the thickness gauge and the frying time.
- Frying timeA quarter of an hour in hot fat will blacken pastry this thin long before the centre matters. Everything inside is already cooked, so the fat is only crisping the crust: 3-4 minutes at 350-360F, turning once, is enough. Time the pastry, not the filling.
- "The thickness of half a crown"The old half-crown coin was roughly 1/16 inch, about 1.5-2 mm. That is thinner than most cooks roll pastry today, and deliberately so, since two layers are pressed together at the rim.
- Stock that jellies when coldThis means a well-reduced veal or chicken stock with real gelatine in it, chilled until set. It moistens the mince without running out in the fat. A firm homemade stock or a good stock reduced by half and chilled will do; a stock cube will not set and will leak.
- Sealing and chillingThe hinge of the whole recipe. Moisten the edges, press hard all round with the cutter, then chill the patties at least 30 minutes before frying. Warm filling and a soft seal split in the fat and the mince is lost.
- "A moderate oven"350F for the baked version, 20-25 minutes, until the pastry is set and pale gold. Egg-wash them if baking; fried patties should be left dry.
- Cayenne and nutmegBoth are common in Victorian seasoning of cold meat. Start with a pinch of each for the three-quarters of a pound of meat and taste the mince before filling, since nothing after this point can be corrected.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound of mince fills about twelve to fourteen patties from a 2 1/2 inch cutter. Enough for a light supper for four, or a first course for six.
- Serving on a napkinA folded napkin absorbs frying fat and was standard for anything fried and served dry. A wire rack and a warm dish do the same work if the table setting is less formal.
Patties of this kind sit at the frugal end of Victorian cookery: they exist to give a second life to cold roast veal, which was common in British kitchens of the period and notoriously bland on its own. The pairing with ham is not decorative but corrective, supplying the salt and savour veal lacks, and the same logic runs through veal-and-ham pies and forcemeat balls of the era. The word patty comes by way of the French pâté and once meant precisely this, a small enclosed pastry, before it drifted in English toward a flat cake of minced meat. Cassell's gives the fried and baked versions together in a single paragraph, leaving the cook to choose between them.