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One Heart Sweetbread
Three Crayfish or Prawns.
Bacon. One gill of Velouté or Béchamel Sauce.
One ounce of grated Parmesan Checse.
Breadcrumbs. One ounce of Butter.
Lobster Spawn or Coral.
One pound of Puff Paste.
Roll out the paste to about an eighth of an inch thick, stamp out ten or twelve rounds, and line small patty-pans with them; trim the edges, and fill the pans with dried peas to keep the paste down while it is cooking (raw rice does just as well). Bake these patties a bright yellow in a hot oven; when cooked, and a little cool, take out the peas or rice, but leave the pastry in the pans. Prepare a ragoût of the sweetbread, crayfish tails and bacon previously cooked, and cut into dice, equal quantities of each. Place these in a stewpan, and warm them up with the velouté or Béchamel sauce. Mix well and fill up the patty-pans with this ragoût, sprinkle on the top of each a little mixture of grated Parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs, and on the top of each patty put a little pat of lobster butter. Put the patties in a very hot oven just to brown them, take them out of the pans, dish them up on a folded napkin, garnish with parsley, and serve.
Petits Darioles de Volaille en Chaudfroid. (Little Moulds of Minced Chicken with Chaudfroid Sauce). Ingredients.
Cne large Fowl.
Two ounces of Butter
A late-Victorian bouchée: blind-baked puff pastry cases filled with a diced ragout of sweetbread, shellfish and bacon, gratinated under cheese and crumbs. Most of the work is preparation done before the pastry ever comes out of the oven.
- The sweetbread comes firstA heart sweetbread is the round, compact gland (as against the ragged "throat" sweetbread) and needs several hours of soaking in cold water changed often, then blanching from cold water, refreshing, peeling off membrane and pressing under a weight until cold and firm. Only then will it cut into clean dice. None of this is stated in the recipe.
- A gill5 fl oz in British measure, a little over half a US cup. That is enough sauce to bind roughly a cup and a half of diced filling without making it soupy; the ragout should mound, not pour.
- Oven temperaturesThe book calls for a "hot oven" for the pastry cases, conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F. The final "very hot oven just to brown them" would be hotter still, or the top of a grill for a minute or two, no longer than it takes the crumb and cheese to colour.
- Blind baking in patty-pansLine the tins, prick the bases, chill the lined pans until firm, then fill with dried peas or rice against a disc of paper. Leaving the baked shells in the tins while you fill them, as directed, is sound: they are fragile and the tin supports them through the second heat.
- Crayfish or prawnsThree crayfish yield very little tail meat, so scale to about 2 oz of picked shellfish meat, cut to the same dice as the sweetbread and bacon. Both should be cooked already; they are only being warmed through in the sauce.
- Lobster butterThe listed "lobster spawn or coral" and butter are for this: pound the coral with an equal weight of soft butter and pass it through a sieve. It sets a bright red-orange and melts over the gratin in the final blast of heat. Shop-bought crab or shellfish butter substitutes acceptably; plain butter loses the point.
- Balance of the fillingEqual parts sweetbread, shellfish and bacon is a lot of bacon. Cut it small and use a mild unsmoked cure, or reduce it, unless you want the smoke to run over the sweetbread and crayfish.
- Yield and serviceTen to twelve small patties, so four to six as a first course. They are best straight from the oven, and the recipe dishes them on a folded napkin with parsley.
Bouch he small change of the Victorian and Edwardian dinner table e filled with whatever the larder held in the way of expensive scraps, then dressed up with a French name.