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Vegetable Patties
Prepare a macedoine of vegetables (see VEGETABLES, MACEDOINE OF); moisten these with nicely-flavoured white sauce, and put a small quantity into ready baked patty-cases (see PATTIES, PREPARATION OF). Serve on a neatly-folded napkin.
A cross-referenced skeleton rather than a full recipe: Cassell's assumes you already have a macedoine and a batch of baked pastry cases on hand. The two things that decide whether it works are the size of the dice and the thickness of the sauce.
- What a macedoine isA mixture of vegetables cut in even small dice, commonly about 1/4 inch, each kind usually cooked separately so it keeps its colour and texture, then combined. Carrot, turnip, French beans and peas are the usual components. The name refers to the mixture rather than to the cut, but even dice is what makes it look right.
- White sauceUsually a flour-and-butter roux let down with milk, or with white stock; vegetable cooking liquor with a little cream gives a lighter version. "Nicely-flavoured" is doing real work here: season it properly, and add a scrape of nutmeg, a squeeze of lemon or a spoon of cream, since boiled vegetables in plain white sauce are dull.
- Sauce consistencyMake it thicker than you would for pouring, coating rather than flowing. Loose sauce soaks the pastry within minutes and the case collapses on the plate.
- Patty-casesSmall puff-pastry shells, what a modern kitchen calls vol-au-vent or bouchee cases, baked empty and their soft centres lifted out. Bought frozen cases work; bake them at 400-425F until dry and coloured through, or the underside stays raw.
- Assemble at the last minuteWarm the cases and the filling separately and fill just before serving. Filled pastry left standing goes soggy from the inside.
- Vegetables cooked, not overcookedVictorian recipes generally give longer boiling times for root vegetables than we would now. Cook the dice until barely tender, refresh in cold water to hold the colour, then reheat in the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, about a pint of dressed vegetables will fill a dozen small cases; two or three per person suits a light course or a savoury.
- The napkinA folded napkin under pastry was standard Victorian service, usually explained as absorbing grease or moisture and keeping the dish from slipping. Modern service can skip it without loss.
Vegetable patties belong to the Victorian repertoire of small hot entrees, dishes designed to be handed round at a supper or set out among the made dishes of a long dinner. The vocabulary is French: macedoine, generally explained as a nod to the mixed peoples of Macedon under Alexander, entered English cookery books in the nineteenth century for any neat mixture of diced vegetables or fruit, and patty is an anglicisation of pate. Cassell's writes in shorthand because its Dictionary was built to be used by cross-reference, each entry assuming the reader will turn to the pastry and macedoine articles for the technique. Meatless entrees like this one were not vegetarian cooking in the modern sense — this filling contains butter and milk — so much as the class of dish a cook could produce from the previous day's cooked vegetables without touching the joint.