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Red Currant Jelly (Roll out the paste rather thin)
Roll out the paste rather thin, and stamp out twelve pieces in the shape of a heart; put a teaspoonful of apricot marmalade on one side of each, and a very little soft almond paste on the top of the apricot; wet the edges of the paste, fold it over and press the edges down well. Make these cakes as much as possible like cutlets, and bake them on a baking-sheet. When the cakes are cold, cover them with dissolved apricot marmalade, and roll them in crushed macaroon crumbs. Have ready some short pieces of baked almond paste, put one in each cake to look like a cutlet bone, mark them like a gridiron with a red-hot skewer, dish them up in a circle on a thin bed of apricot marmalade; melt some red-currant jelly, and when it is nearly cold, but still liquid enough to run, pour it into the middle of the circle of cakes. It is now ready for table.
This is a trompe-l'oeil pastry — sweet "cutlets" of filled paste, crumbed, glazed and set in a pool of red currant jelly. The original assumes you already have puff paste, apricot marmalade and almond paste on the bench, which is how these books were written for cooks working through a chapter rather than a single page.
- What "the paste" isThe recipe does not say. In a high-class sweets chapter this most likely means puff paste or a rich rough puff, rolled thin. A shortcrust will not give the layered edge that makes the shape read as a cutlet.
- Apricot marmaladeNot citrus marmalade. This is apricot jam boiled down and sieved smooth, the standard glaze of the period. Modern sieved apricot jam warmed with a spoonful of water is the same thing; "dissolved" simply means melted until it flows.
- Sealing is the hingeWet the edges and press firmly; chilling the shaped cutlets before baking is a modern precaution the original does not mention. Warm jam under a thin paste will find any gap and burst it, and once the filling escapes the crumb coating has nothing to stick to.
- OvenNo temperature is given. If the paste is puff, cakes of this size want a hot oven, roughly 400-425F, for 15-20 minutes until well risen and dry through.
- The cutlet boneA short baton of almond paste, baked separately until firm and pale so it holds its shape and colour. Bake it at a lower heat than the pastry — almond paste colours fast — and let it cool hard before pushing it into the narrow end.
- Marking with a red-hot skewerA metal skewer heated until it just glows, then laid across the crumbed surface in lines to imitate gridiron bars. Work quickly, over a board, and expect a little smoke; the crumbs scorch rather than burn.
- Macaroon crumbsDried almond macaroons crushed to a coarse crumb, not a powder. Amaretti work well. Crumb the cutlets while the glaze is tacky, not wet, or the coating goes to paste.
- The jellyMelt red currant jelly gently and let it cool until it has thickened but will still flow — this is a short window. Poured hot it will soak the pastry bed; poured cold it sits in lumps.
- YieldTwelve cutlets, so six to twelve servings depending on whether they are offered as one each or two. Assemble on the serving dish; they do not travel once the jelly is poured.
Sweet dishes disguised as savoury ones were a set piece of late nineteenth-century professional cookery, and "cutlets" were a favourite joke of the type — in aspic, in ice cream, in chicken and rice croquettes, and here in puff paste with an almond-paste bone standing in for the rib. The visual pun depended on the whole household knowing what a real cutlet looked like on a dish: crumbed, gridiron-marked from the grill, arranged in a ring, and often set around a central garnish. Red currant jelly poured into the middle carries the joke further, since jelly was the standard accompaniment to mutton cutlets and to game. Apricot marmalade doing double duty as filling, glue and glaze is characteristic of the period's kitchen economy at the top end: one boiled-down, sieved preparation kept in a jar and used everywhere in the pastry section. Recipes of this kind belong to the world of the trained cook working to a French-derived repertoire in a large English house, where a course of entremets was expected to amuse as much as to feed.