Home › Savouries and Hors d'Oeuvre › Strips of Pimento
Strips of Pimento
Croûtes of Bread, cut crescent shape.
Chop the lobster flesh finely, and mix it with the white sauce, cream and tomato sauce. Season with lemon-juice, salt, pepper and cayenne. Dissolve the gelatine in the aspic jelly and mix with the other ingredients. Spread the mixture evenly on a wet dish and allow it to set. Then cut it out into crescent shapes and place each on a croûte of bread. Decorate with strips of pimento and pipe coral butter around the edge.
Petites Condoles à l'Anchois. (Little Moulds of Anchovies.) Ingredients.
Quarter of a pound of Flour.
Two ounces of Butter.
One tablespoonful of Anchovy Essence.
This page has been mangled by the typesetting: the ingredient list for the lobster crescents is missing, and the entry runs straight into the beginning of the next recipe (Petites Condoles à l'Anchois). What survives is a clear method, and the proportions are recoverable from standard Edwardian practice.
- Missing quantitiesNo amounts are given for the lobster, sauces or gelatine. A workable reading of a savoury of this type is the flesh of one small cooked lobster (about 8 oz picked meat) bound with roughly 4 fl oz thick béchamel, 2 tablespoons cream and 1 tablespoon tomato sauce. Treat this as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- The hinge: the setEverything depends on the mixture setting firm enough to cut cleanly and still hold its shape at room temperature on a plate. The recipe gives no figure; something in the region of 1/4 to 1/2 oz powdered gelatine per pint of total mixture is a reasonable starting point, bearing in mind that the aspic jelly is itself setting the mixture, and the spread layer wants several hours in the cold. Too soft and the crescents slump; too stiff and they eat like rubber.
- Aspic jellyIn period usage this meant a clarified, well-reduced stock jelly, usually veal or fish, kept on hand in the larder. Modern cooks can use a strong reduced fish or chicken stock set with gelatine, or a commercial aspic powder. It is here for flavour and gloss as much as for setting power.
- Coral butterThe coral is the roe of a hen lobster, which turns bright red on cooking. It is pounded with an equal weight of softened butter and pushed through a sieve, giving a vivid pink piping butter. Lobsters sold cooked rarely come with usable coral now; a butter tinted with a little tomato purée or paprika is the usual substitute.
- Pimento stripsPimento here means the sweet red pepper preserved in brine or oil, not the allspice berry sometimes called pimento in older books. Jarred piquillo or roasted red pepper, blotted dry and cut into narrow strips, is the same thing.
- CroûtesCut crescents from firm white bread a scant 1/4 inch thick and either fry them in clarified butter or dry them in a 325F oven until crisp and pale gold. They must be fully crisp or they will go soft under the moist filling within minutes.
- Assembly and timingUse the same cutter for the bread and the set mixture so the edges align. Put the crescents together no more than an hour before serving and keep them cool; piped butter softens quickly in a warm room.
- Yield and serviceThe quantities above give roughly 12 to 16 small crescents, one or two per person. As a savoury these came at the end of dinner, after the sweet, served cold on a napkin-lined dish.
Savouries were the peculiar signature of the late Victorian and Edwardian English dinner: a small, sharply seasoned, usually salty mouthful served after the sweet course and before dessert, a habit foreign visitors found baffling and English diners regarded as indispensable. Anchovy, cheese, bloater, marrow and shellfish all did duty here, and cold moulded preparations bound with aspic — a specialism of the professional cook, since clear jelly was troublesome to make and showed off skill — were prized for the way they could be cut, decorated and piped into precise shapes. The pairing of lobster with its own coral worked into butter is a piece of thrift dressed as luxury: nothing of an expensive shellfish was wasted, and the roe supplied a vivid colour. Books titled High Class Cookery were generally aimed at cooks in large private households and at the training schools that supplied them, which may be why the method assumes you already know how to clarify aspic and pound a coral butter.