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Paprike and Cayenne Pepper
One tablespoonful of White Sauce.
Prepare a short-crust paste with the flour, two ounces of butter, a pinch of cayenne, one ounce of cheese, one yolk of egg, lemon-juice, and a little water.
Put about half a small haddock in a tin, with a little butter, into the oven for ten minutes; remove the skin and bones, and chop the flesh finely; mix with the remainder of butter and cheese; season with paprike, and moisten with the sauce and half a yolk of egg.
Roll out the paste one-eighth of an inch thick ; stamp out some rounds with a two-inch cutter.
Put a tablespoonful of the mixture in the centre of each round, wet the edges, and take up these edges in such a manner as to form a triangular shape, similar to a pope's cap (Talmouse). Brush over with egg, sprinkle a tiny pinch of paprike on top of each, and bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes. Dish up, and serve hot.
A cheese-pastry talmouse with a haddock filling, from the savoury course that closed an Edwardian dinner. The page has been separated from its ingredient list, so several quantities have to be reconstructed.
- The missing quantities"The flour" and "the remainder of butter and cheese" refer to a headnote that is not on this page, so the amounts are genuinely unrecoverable as printed. A workable short crust at this butter level is about 4 oz (115 g) flour to the 2 oz butter; for the filling allow roughly another 1 oz butter and 1 oz cheese beyond what goes into the paste.
- PaprikeA variant spelling of paprika, at the time a relatively novel imported spice, sold in grades such as sweet or rose paprika. Use sweet paprika, not smoked; note that the recipe puts the cayenne in the pastry and the paprika in the filling and on top.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F (175C). Small pastries of this size take colour better at 375-400F; if you raise the oven, check before the ten minutes are up.
- Half a small haddockYou want about 4-5 oz (120-140 g) of cooked, flaked flesh. A single haddock fillet does it. The ten minutes with a little butter is a gentle bake to set the flesh so it flakes cleanly, not a full cooking of a whole fish -- if your fillet is thin, six or seven minutes is enough.
- The cheeseParmesan or a hard dry cheese such as an aged Cheddar suits this kind of savoury. Grate it fine; a moist modern block Cheddar will loosen the paste and make it hard to shape.
- White sauceOne tablespoon of white sauce, used purely to bind. It works best stiff enough to hold its shape on the spoon; a thin sauce will make the filling run and burst the seams in the oven.
- Shaping the pope's capBring three points of the wetted rim up to meet over the centre and pinch the three seams firmly. This is the hinge of the dish: a tablespoon of filling on a two-inch round is generous, so underfill slightly rather than force the edges, which will otherwise spring open as the butter melts.
- YieldPerhaps a dozen from a two-inch cutter, depending on the reconstructed quantities. They must go to table hot.
The talmouse is a French pastry of long standing, generally traced to Saint-Denis outside Paris, where the cheese-filled version was a local speciality sold to travellers; the three-cornered shape drawn up over the filling gave it its usual English gloss, "pope's cap" or bonnet. What is distinctly late-Victorian here is the filling: haddock, a cheap North Sea fish, dressed with white sauce and paprika and served in a two-inch pastry case as a savoury -- the small, sharp, hot dish that came after the sweet in a formal dinner and was meant to clear the palate for the wine. Paprika itself is often said to have been a fashionable import in British high-class kitchens around the turn of the century, arriving through Austro-Hungarian cookery.