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Meat for Beef Patties
Mince half a pound of good fresh suet; put it to 1 pound of beef and 1 pound of veal, cut into small pieces, but not chopped. Season it with pepper, salt, allspice, and a very little mace--the allspice and mace should be pounded. Mix all together; and when wanted for patties, cut up a little parsley, and shred 1 blade of shallot, very finely, to mix with it. Bake in patty-pans or buttered saucers for half an hour. They are also good cold, and may be warmed up at any time.
This is a filling rather than a finished dish: the recipe assumes you have pastry-lined patty-pans ready, and gives no oven temperature or seasoning quantities. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A filled pastry case of this kind wants a fairly hot oven, 400-425F, so the crust sets before the meat releases its juices. Check that the centre of the filling has reached 160F rather than trusting the half hour.
- Patty-pans and saucersPatty-pans are small shallow tins roughly the size of a modern muffin or tartlet tin. "Buttered saucers" means exactly that: ovenproof saucers used as moulds. A 12-cup muffin tin is the closest equivalent.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher, minced fine, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet is dry-processed and rolled in flour, so it behaves differently; if you use it, expect a slightly drier result. Suet is a fifth of the total mixture here (half a pound to two pounds of meat), which is what keeps the lean beef and veal from turning to sawdust.
- Cut small, not choppedThis is the hinge. The meat is meant to be diced by hand into small pieces so the filling stays coarse and juicy; run it through a grinder and you get a dense meatball texture instead. Aim for pieces around a quarter inch.
- "1 blade of shallot"Blade is normally used of mace, not alliums; here it stands for one clove or small bulb of shallot. One shallot for two pounds of meat is restrained, and doubling it will not hurt.
- SpicesPounded allspice and mace means freshly ground whole spice, which is markedly stronger than jarred powder. For two pounds of meat plus suet, start at half a teaspoon allspice, a scant quarter teaspoon mace, a teaspoon of salt and a good grind of pepper, then fry a spoonful of the mixture to taste it before filling the pastry.
- Making aheadThe seasoned meat and suet keep two days refrigerated; the parsley and shallot are added only at the point of baking, as the recipe directs, because they go dull and grassy if they sit in salt.
- YieldAbout two and a half pounds of filling, enough for a dozen tartlet-sized patties. Reheat leftovers in a 325F oven rather than a microwave, which drives the suet out of the filling.
Beef patties in this sense belong to the older English tradition of the raised or lined meat pie in miniature, sold hot from bakers' and pastry-cooks' shops and eaten out of the hand long before the word suggested a flat disc of hamburger. The pairing of beef with veal and a proportion of suet is common in nineteenth-century pie cookery, where lean butcher's meat needed added fat to keep it moist. Allspice with a little mace was a common warm seasoning for English forcemeats and pies of the period. The note that they are good cold and may be warmed up at any time suggests why the dish suited a household compendium.