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Cayenne Pepper (Little Salt)
A little Salt.
Line some small patty-pans with good paste, very thin, and fill them with rice, so that they may be kept hollow, and bake ten minutes; then take out the rice, blanch the oysters, and remove the beards only, not the muscle part, and lay them in cold water to keep their colour. Melt the butter, fry the shalot, add the flour and curry-powder, the liquor from the oysters, cayenne, and lemon-juice; when this is cooked over the fire, add the cream and the carrot, cut up in dice; fill the cases with this mixture, and put on the top of each case one oyster glazed. When finished, cover with a buttered paper, and make hot in the oven.
To Warm up Perch.
Ingredients.
Cold cooked Perch.
Half a pint of Port Wine.
One quart of Stock.
One large Onion.
Twelve whole Peppers.
A late-Victorian oyster patty, printed here with its ingredient list lost and the opening of a perch recipe running on at the end. The method is complete enough to follow, but every quantity has to be judged by eye.
- The missing ingredient listThe header ("Cayenne Pepper — A little Salt") is the tail end of a list that has been separated from its recipe in the original setting. Butter, flour, curry powder, shalot, cream, carrot, lemon and oysters are all named in the method; none has a stated amount. Treat it as a small roux sauce: about 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, the strained oyster liquor plus cream to make roughly half a pint.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tartlet tins, about 2-2.5 inches across, not muffin cups. The recipe gives no yield and no indication of how many it serves.
- Baking blind with riceThe rice is a weight to hold the pastry hollow, doing the job later given to ceramic baking beans. Set the raw rice on paper or foil rather than directly on the pastry, or grains will embed in the crust. The book gives no oven temperature, and ten minutes is short for shortcrust, so judge the shells by eye rather than by the clock.
- Oven temperaturesFinal reheating -- The recipe says only to 'make hot in the oven' and gives no temperature. The filling is already cooked and the oysters blanched, so only a gentle heat is wanted, enough to warm through.
- The oysters are the hingeBlanching here is brief, and the recipe has them put straight into cold water to keep their colour, with the liquor saved for the sauce. Removing 'the beards only, not the muscle part' leaves each oyster whole. Prolonged cooking will toughen them.
- Shalot and curry powderShalot is shallot, chopped very fine. Commercial curry powders of the period were generally milder than a modern hot madras blend, which will swamp the oysters; use a mild powder and fry it with the flour in the butter, as the recipe directs, to cook out the raw taste.
- Glazed oysterGlazing here means brushing with reduced stock or meat glaze for shine, not sugar. A little of the reduced oyster liquor brushed over does the same job.
- Buttered paperGreased paper laid over the tops, which keeps the filling from drying and the pastry rims from scorching.
- The perch fragmentThe last four lines belong to a separate recipe for warming up cold cooked perch in port and stock. Ignore them when making the patties.
Small hot pastry cases filled with a curried cream sauce sit squarely in the British savoury tradition of the 1880s and 1890s, when a dish of this size might close a dinner after the sweet or appear among the entrées. The curry powder is not an oddity: Anglo-Indian seasoning had been standard in British kitchens for a century by then. The book's title, High Class Cookery Recipes, signals its audience: cooks in service in substantial households, working from ingredient lists and terse method notes rather than the step-by-step instruction a home cook would need, which is why the loss of the quantities here leaves so little to go on.