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One Egg (Breadcrumbs Make the panada)
Breadcrumbs. Make the panada, stir in the macaroni and ham chopped, add the cheese and seasoning; turn this on to a plate to cool. Make it up into croquettes, egg and crumb, and fry.
Filets de Bœuf à la Madeleine. (Fillets of Beef à la Madeleine.) A Fillet of Beef.
Ingredients.
Three ounces of clarified Butter.
Three ounces of Meat Glaze.
Four ounces of fresh Butter.
The juice of a Lemon.
This page is a printing casualty: the tail of a macaroni-and-ham croquette recipe runs straight into the opening of an unrelated beef fillet. Only the croquette portion can be cooked from, and even that assumes you know what a panada is.
- PanadaA very thick binding paste; the stray 'Breadcrumbs' at the head of the fragment suggests a bread panada, crumbs moistened with milk or stock and cooked until it leaves the sides of the pan. Victorian kitchens also used a flour-and-butter version. Either will bind croquettes.
- Working proportionsThe quantities were on the previous page and are lost here. As a modern reconstruction only, for roughly 12 croquettes try about 1 cup milk to 1 cup fine dry breadcrumbs, plus a cup each of cooked short macaroni and chopped cooked ham, and 2 oz grated hard cheese; adjust the liquid until the paste is stiff.
- The hinge is the chilling"Turn this on to a plate to cool" is not a pause, it is the step that makes the dish possible. The mixture must be cold and stiff right through, an hour or more refrigerated, or the croquettes burst in the fat.
- Egg and crumbPeriod shorthand for a coating: beaten egg, then fine breadcrumbs (a preliminary dusting of flour is a modern habit, not part of the phrase). A second egg-and-crumb layer on croquettes with a loose interior is worth the trouble.
- FryingDeep fat at 350-375F, two to three minutes until deep gold. The filling is already cooked, so you are only setting the crust and heating through.
- Cheese and seasoningNeither is specified in the surviving text; a dry grating cheese such as Parmesan is the likely intention. Salt lightly, since cooked ham and hard cheese carry most of what the mixture needs. Cayenne and a scrape of nutmeg would be usual seasonings for such a mixture.
- Meat glaze, in the fragment belowGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a rubbery jelly at room temperature. Commercial demi-glace or glace concentrate is the nearest modern stand-in; strengths vary widely, so taste rather than trusting a fixed conversion.
- YieldNo number is given, and the quantities are missing. On the reconstructed proportions above you would get roughly a dozen croquettes, enough for about four as a first course.
Croquettes of this sort were a familiar feature of the late-Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchen, and their logic is thrift dressed as refinement: yesterday's boiled ham and a handful of macaroni, bound with a crumb panada, become a hot entree that can be shaped in advance and fried to order. The panada itself is an old French kitchen staple, generally traced to the same family of bread-thickened preparations that gave us quenelles and forcemeat binders. The half-recipe that follows, filets de boeuf a la Madeleine, belongs to the nineteenth-century convention of naming garnished fillets after people and places, a habit that filled menu cards with names whose origins were already vague when they were printed. That the two run together here is simply a matter of extraction, the page having been cut from its context, and a reminder that pages torn from their neighbours lose half their meaning.