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Salt, Pepper and Nutmeg
Breadcrumbs. Frying Fat.
Remove the outside part of the skin and gristle from the meat; chop it up finely with the bacon or ham. Put the butter in a stewpan; when hot add the chopped shalot, and fry it a little; stir in the flour; let it cook, but do not let it brown; add the stock gradually, and when boiling add the chopped meat, chopped parsley, and lemon juice.
Stir this over the fire until the meat is thoroughly hot; then bind with two yolks of eggs. Season to taste with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg.
Keep stirring over the fire until the eggs are set; then spread the meat out on a dish, cover with a piece of buttered paper, and let it cool.
When cold, make it up into neat cork-shapes, spread out the caul, cut it into square pieces, and wrap each piece of meat neatly in the caul. Dip them in the beaten egg; roll them in the breadcrumbs; stand them aside for about ten minutes, and then fry them a golden colour in hot fat or clarified butter. Drain them on a cloth; dish them up on a folded napkin; garnish with a few sprigs of parsley, and serve, with cucumber sauce separately in a boat.
Épigrammes de Faisan à la Jardinière. (Small Fillets of Pheasant with Vegetables.) Ingredients.
This page is a fragment: it begins mid-recipe, so the quantities are on the preceding page and the ingredient line trailing at the end belongs to the next dish. What survives is the full method for caul-wrapped croquettes — crépinettes — and that method is entirely workable once you know the proportions.
- The missing ingredientsThe list is not on this page, so any amounts are guesswork. A workable ratio for this style of forcemeat is about 1 lb cooked meat to 2 oz bacon or ham, 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, a scant cup of stock, one shallot, two egg yolks — but treat that as reconstruction, not as the book's own figures.
- CaulCaul is the lacy fat membrane from around a pig's stomach. Butchers still sell it, usually frozen and salted; soak it in tepid water until it unfurls without tearing, then pat dry. Nothing else behaves the same way, though a very thin sheet of pork back fat or a blanched cabbage leaf will hold the shape if caul is unavailable.
- "Shalot"Simply shallot; a common spelling in cookery books of the period.
- The hinge: cook the panada outThis is a thick velouté bound further with yolks. Let the flour cook in the butter without colouring, add the stock gradually, and keep the mixture stiff — a slack forcemeat will not hold a cork shape and will burst the caul in the fat. It should be paste-like when hot and firm as cold butter when chilled.
- Setting the eggsOnce the yolks go in, keep the pan moving over gentle heat. Anything approaching a boil will curdle them and the mixture will turn grainy; you want it to thicken and pull away from the sides, no more.
- ChillingThe buttered paper is there to stop a skin forming. Spread the mixture no more than an inch deep and refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight — thoroughly cold is what makes the shaping possible.
- FryingThe book says only 'hot fat or clarified butter'; in modern terms fat at roughly 350-375F suits. The caul renders and the crumbs colour in a few minutes; because everything inside is already cooked, colour is the only doneness cue. Drain on a rack or paper rather than the recommended cloth.
- Vessels and serviceA "stewpan" is a straight-sided, lidded pan; any heavy saucepan will do. The folded napkin and sauce boat are dining-room fashion of the day, not technique. Reckon on two croquettes per person as a first course; on the reconstructed quantities in [0] that is about a dozen in all.
Crépinettes — small flat sausages or croquettes wrapped in caul rather than a casing — are French charcuterie carried wholesale into the repertoire of the English country-house kitchen, where a French-trained cook was a mark of standing. The technique exists for two reasons: caul melts as it cooks, basting the mixture from outside, and it holds together a forcemeat too soft for any casing. Books of this type, aimed at professional cooks and ambitious households in the decades around 1900, are full of such dishes because they turned yesterday's roast into something that could face a dinner table again; the instruction to strip skin and gristle from "the meat" is the giveaway that cold cooked joints, game, or trimmings are the intended starting point. Cucumber sauce alongside was a standard Victorian foil for rich fried things, salmon most famously.