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Salt and Pepper (Three ounces of Puff-paste)
Three ounces of Puff-paste.
Beat the eggs in a basin for a few minutes, melt the butter and stir it and the cheese to the eggs, and a little pepper and salt. Roll the paste out thinly, and cut it in half; spread the cheese mixture over one half of the paste and lay the other half over it. Cut this out in rounds with a cutter; brush over with egg, and bake in a quick oven for about ten minutes.
A Victorian cheese savoury: two thin sheets of puff paste sandwiching a cheese-and-egg paste, cut into rounds and baked hot. The printed text carries over only the first line of the ingredient list, so the quantities of egg, butter and cheese have to be judged.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the three ounces of puff paste survives in this printing; the eggs, butter and cheese are unquantified. For three ounces of paste, one egg, about half an ounce of melted butter and two ounces of dry grated cheese give a spreadable paste of roughly the right consistency, but this is a reconstruction, not the original measure.
- "A quick oven"425-450F (220-230C). Puff paste needs the initial blast to turn its water to steam and lift the layers; a slack oven gives greasy, flat rounds.
- The cheeseThe recipe does not name the cheese. A hard, dry, well-matured cheese suits this kind of savoury — Cheddar, or Parmesan for a sharper result. A young or high-moisture cheese will weep fat and make the join between the sheets sodden.
- Rolling and sealingRoll thinly, but keep the two halves the same thickness so they bake evenly. Press the edges of each round lightly after cutting, or the filling escapes and burns on the tray.
- CuttingA plain cutter of about 1.5 inches suits a savoury eaten in one or two bites. Cut straight down without twisting — a twisted edge seals the laminations and the round rises lopsided.
- Egg washBrush the tops only. Egg wash running down the cut edge glues the layers together and stunts the rise.
- TimingTen minutes at that heat is right for small rounds; they are done when puffed and evenly browned. Larger rounds need twelve to fifteen, and are better for a minute or two of resting before serving.
- Yield and serviceThree ounces of paste makes only a dozen or so small rounds — a single course for two or three people. Savouries were served hot from the oven, at the very end of dinner, and they collapse and toughen as they cool.
The savoury course — a small, salty, usually hot mouthful served after the sweet and before dessert — was a fixture of the British dinner table from the later nineteenth century into the 1930s, and is largely a British peculiarity; French service placed cheese elsewhere. Cheese straws, anchovy toasts, devilled biscuits and cheese-filled puff rounds of exactly this kind filled the slot, the reasoning generally given being that a savoury bite settled the palate after sweetness and suited the port that followed. The construction here, a filling laid between two thin sheets of paste and stamped out as sealed rounds, is the same one that produces the older meat-filled patty, scaled down and turned to cheese.