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Salt, Cayenne, Nutmeg
Half a pint of Brown Sauce.
One ounce of Parmesan Cheese.
Pound the fowl well and season thoroughly.
Roll the paste out thinly, lay the pounded fowl on in little heaps, fold the paste over and cut out like small croquettes. Let these stand for half an hour to dry thoroughly. Then drop them into boiling water and cook for about ten minutes. Drain, and serve with the cheese and sauce over.
This is the tail end of a savoury that is essentially ravioli: pounded cooked fowl sealed in a thin paste, poached, and finished with brown sauce and Parmesan. The printed page carries only part of the ingredient list, so quantities for the fowl and the paste have to be judged by eye.
- The list is incompleteThe heading "Salt, Cayenne, Nutmeg" and the two measured items are all that survive of the ingredients; the fowl and the paste are never quantified. Work from about 8 oz of cooked fowl to a two-egg pasta dough and adjust.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, or a scant 1¼ US cups of brown sauce. One ounce of Parmesan is roughly a third to a half cup grated, depending how finely.
- Brown sauceNot the bottled condiment. In books of this period it is most likely espagnole or a reduced demi-glace, made from browned stock and roux.
- Pounded fowlFowl worked in a mortar to a smooth paste, usually with a little butter or sauce to bind. The ten-minute poach suggests the meat was already cooked, though the recipe does not say so. A food processor does the same job in seconds; keep it stiff enough to hold a heap.
- Season hardThe hinge of the dish. A poached, unbrowned forcemeat tastes flat unless it is seasoned harder than seems right when raw -- hence the salt, cayenne and nutmeg in the ingredient list. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture and taste before filling.
- The half-hour restDrying the assembled shapes firms the seal and stops them opening in the water. Do not skip it, and press the air out as you fold.
- "Boiling water"Bring it to the boil, then hold it at a bare simmer before the parcels go in. A rolling boil tears thin paste. Ten minutes suits fresh pasta round a cooked filling; test one.
- ServingA savoury course portion is small. With the fowl and paste unquantified the yield cannot be pinned down; half a pint of sauce will dress several small portions. Serve very hot on warmed plates, sauce first, cheese over.
The savoury was the last course of a formal British dinner from the later nineteenth century into the 1930s, a small hot, sharp or salty mouthful served after the sweet and before dessert fruit. This one is ravioli in all but name: Italian filled pasta was known in English professional kitchens well before this book, and was commonly taught as a French-inflected technique rather than as an Italian dish, which may be part of why the dough is called "paste" and the finish is espagnole rather than tomato. Pounding cooked poultry in a mortar to a fine paste was routine kitchen labour before mechanical mincers and processors, and appears throughout these books in quenelles, croquettes and forcemeats; the instruction to "season thoroughly" is the standard warning that pounded white meat tastes of very little on its own.