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Pepper and Salt (Line eight small patty pans)
Line eight small patty pans with the paste, shape some twisted slips of paste, bake them, and fasten each end crossways, with some yolk of egg and flour mixed, to the sides of the patty pans.
Fill up the interior of the patty pans with raw rice, bake in a quick oven for about ten minutes, turn out the rice, and set them to cool. Have ready some cooked macédoine of vegetables, drain well on a cloth, season with a little oil, vinegar, pepper and salt, moisten with a tablespoonful of aspic; fill the baked crusts with the mixture.
Mask the surface of each with aspic; ornament with fancy shapes of lemon rind or truffles, garnish with sprigs of fresh parsley. Dish up, and serve.
The remnants of truffle can be mixed with the macédoine.
A cold hors d'oeuvre built on eight blind-baked tartlet cases, each fitted with a baked pastry handle. Almost everything that can go wrong here is moisture: wet vegetables will collapse the pastry and stop the aspic setting cleanly.
- Drain the macédoine hardThis is the hinge. The diced vegetables must be dried on a cloth until they no longer weep, then dressed only lightly. Any free liquid will soften the crusts within minutes and cloud the aspic glaze.
- "The paste"The book assumes a pastry given elsewhere. A firm short paste holds the shape of small cases and the twisted handles better than puff, which will distort as it rises.
- Patty pansSmall tartlet or bun tins, roughly 2 to 2.5 inches across and shallow. Modern mini-muffin tins are deeper and will give you a taller, more awkward case.
- Raw riceAn early form of baking beans. Line each case with a scrap of parchment first, or grains lodge in the pastry; the rice can be cooled and kept in a jar and reused many times for the same purpose.
- A quick oven425-450F. Ten minutes is right for cases that thin, but check at eight: they should be set and pale gold, since they get no second bake.
- Yolk and flour pasteA thick egg-yolk glue used to fix the baked handles to the sides of the cases. In the recipe the handles go on before the cases are filled with rice, so the join sets during the ten-minute bake that follows.
- MacédoineEvenly diced mixed vegetables, classically carrot, turnip, French beans and peas, each cooked separately to keep the colours distinct. Cook until just tender; anything softer breaks down under the dressing.
- AspicA clarified savoury jelly, here used both to bind and to glaze. It must be liquid but cool and beginning to thicken when you spoon it over, or it will run off and soak the pastry.
- Truffles and lemon rindCut into small fancy shapes as decoration only. Thin discs of black olive or blanched red pepper give the same dark-and-bright contrast at a fraction of the cost.
- Yield and serviceEight cases, one per person as a cold hors d'oeuvre. Assemble no more than an hour before serving and keep chilled; they do not survive standing.
The savoury and hors d'oeuvre course in late Victorian and Edwardian service put a premium on small cold set pieces that could be built in advance and arranged decoratively on a dish paper, and this is a textbook example: a pastry case turned into a miniature basket with its own handle, filled with jellied vegetables and finished with cut-out garnish. Macédoine, a mixture of small even dice, is generally traced to the idea of Macedonia as an assemblage of different peoples, and by this period it was a standard term of the professional kitchen rather than a novelty. Aspic work of this kind was a mark of a trained cook, since it required clear stock, careful clarification and a sense of exactly when the jelly was cool enough to coat. Truffle appears here in the way it usually does in these books, as a decorative black note used sparingly, with the offcuts thriftily stirred back into the filling.