Home › Savouries and Hors d'Oeuvre › Petits Paniers à la Jardinière
Petits Paniers à la Jardinière
(Little Baskets of Savoury Vegetables.) Ingredients.
Oil and Vinegar. Half a Lemon. One tablespoonful of Aspic Jelly. One small Truffle. Quarter of a pound of Short Paste.
Half a pint of Macédoine of Vegetables.
The entry is really an ingredients note rather than a method — the book assumes you already know how to line and bake small pastry cases and how to make a macédoine. Here is what the two lines actually ask for.
- Short pasteA plain short crust for lining, flour and butter with a pinch of salt and just enough liquid to bind. Quarter of a pound presumably means the made-up dough rather than the flour alone, which would line something like eight to ten small barquette or tartlet moulds.
- Baking the casesLine the moulds, prick the bases, fill with beans or rice and bake blind in a fairly brisk oven, then a few minutes more uncovered until the pastry is dry and pale gold. They must be cold and crisp before filling or the vegetables will soften them. The book supplies no oven or timing here.
- What a macédoine isA mixture of vegetables cut to uniform small dice — classically carrot, turnip, French beans and green peas — each cooked separately so nothing overcooks or bleeds colour, then drained and cooled. Half a pint here is ten fluid ounces, which fills the cases generously.
- Binding and seasoningThe entry specifies no dressing. A macédoine served cold in pastry would usually be bound with a spoonful or two of thick mayonnaise, or a little aspic-thickened cream; served hot, with butter or a spoonful of béchamel.
- Assemble at the last momentThis is the hinge. Pastry and filling should meet only just before serving; baskets filled and held for an hour go limp and are not worth eating.
- Handles"Paniers" implies a handle. If you want one, cut thin strips of the same paste and bake them over a curved mould so they set in an arch, then set one on each basket after filling; handles baked in place on the case are fragile.
- Yield and place at tableThe quantities suggest somewhere around eight to ten small baskets, served as a savoury at the end of dinner or as an hors d'oeuvre; the book states no number.
The savoury course — a small hot or piquant mouthful served after the sweet and before dessert — was a fixture of formal British dinners from the later nineteenth century into the 1930s, and cookery schools of the period turned out variations on the same idea: a crisp pastry container, a neatly cut filling, a name in French. À la jardinière, "in the gardener's manner", signals a garnish of fresh vegetables cut and cooked separately, and it is closely allied to the macédoine, a term generally traced to the mixed nationalities of Macedonia and used in French kitchens for any medley of small even dice. The entry is terse — less a recipe than a note on how to combine two things.