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Breadcrumbs, Egg and Frying Fat
Put one ounce of butter and the water on the fire in a saucepan. When boiling stir in the flour.
Stir vigorously for a few minutes (till the sides and bottom of the pan are left clean). Cool a little and incorporate the two eggs. Pound the cheese and remaining ounce of butter, and mix these with the above ingredients, adding the mustard and cayenne at the last. Spread the mixture on to a buttered plate and let cool on the ice. Shape into cutlets, egg and crumb them, and fry in deep fat a golden colour. Serve with toast in strips. Garnish with tarragon.
Crême au Parmesan en Caisses.
Make a thick custard, season with pepper, salt, and cayenne. To one pint of custard add about three ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, and bake in cases.
Two Parmesan savouries run together in the original: fried cheese cutlets built on a choux-style paste, and a baked cheese custard. The printed extract carries the instructions but not the full ingredient list, so read the quantities below as guidance rather than transcription.
- Missing quantitiesThe water and flour amounts are not given in this text, and the weight of cheese for the cutlets is only implied. The proportions described are those of a choux-type paste, but the original figures are genuinely absent.
- The hinge: dry the pasteStirring "till the sides and bottom of the pan are left clean" is the whole trick. A paste still holding water will slump when shaped and can burst in the fat; keep it over heat until it balls up and films the pan base.
- Cheese goes in cold-ishCool the paste a little before the eggs, then work in the pounded cheese and butter. Parmesan worked into a hot paste can go oily. Pounding meant a mortar; finely grated cheese creamed with the butter does the same job.
- "Cool on the ice"Chilling on a block of ice or in an icebox. Spread the mixture thinly on the buttered plate and chill until firm enough to cut cleanly into cutlet shapes.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than a prepared jarred mustard, though the text does not say which. Half a teaspoon is plenty against the cayenne.
- Deep fat375F. Lower and the paste soaks; hotter and the crumbs colour before the centre heats through. Fry in small batches, two or three minutes, and drain on paper.
- Yield and serviceService -- Serve straight from the fat with the toast fingers; they collapse if held. The yield cannot be calculated, as the original quantities are missing.
- The custard in cases"Cases" are small paper soufflé cases or china ramekins. A pint of thick custard with 3 oz Parmesan will fill six to eight. The original says only "bake in cases"; a bain-marie in a moderate oven, around 325F for 20-25 minutes, until just set with a slight wobble, is the safe reading. Boiling water round them or a hotter oven will curdle the eggs.
Both dishes belong to the savoury, the small hot, sharply seasoned course that late-Victorian and Edwardian dinners in Britain served after the sweet and before dessert fruit — a course that had no real counterpart in French menus of the same period, and one that many English cookery books of the 1880s and 1890s give a distinct chapter to. Parmesan seems to have been the usual cheese here: hard enough to keep in a larder, salty and dry enough to flavour a paste or custard without loosening it. The cutlet itself is a professional cook's conceit — the same panada or choux base used for quenelles and croquettes, chilled, cut to the outline of a lamb cutlet and crumbed, so that a plate of cheese arrives looking like a plate of meat. The garnish here is tarragon rather than the near-universal parsley.