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Talmouse de Merluche Fumé
Ingredients.
Three ounces of Flour (sifted).
Three ounces of Butter.
Two ounces of grated Parmesan Cheese.
Two yolks of Eggs.
One teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
This page gives the ingredient list only; the method that would have followed it in the book is absent, and so is the smoked hake the title names. Treat it as a working formula for a cheese pastry rather than a complete set of instructions.
- The missing fishMerluche fumé is smoked hake, though in older French usage merluche is also used of dried cod. The fish does not appear in the ingredient list at all, so the quantity is unrecoverable from this page; presumably it was flaked and boned before being combined with the paste, but the method is missing and the filling cannot be reconstructed from what survives.
- WeightsThree ounces of flour is about 85 g, three ounces of butter the same, two ounces of Parmesan about 55 g. The fat-to-flour ratio of 1:1 points to a rich short paste or a choux-type paste rather than an ordinary pastry.
- What a talmouse isA small tartlet or turnover, usually pinched into three corners so that it stands up like a tricorn hat. The three-cornered form is the shape most often described, though the origin of the name itself is not settled.
- ParmesanBuy a wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano and grate it yourself. Pre-grated cheese is usually treated with an anti-caking agent, which dulls the flavour.
- OvenThe page gives no baking instruction. As modern guidance, cheese pastries of this size are generally baked in a fairly hot oven, around 400-425F, so that they set and colour quickly.
- Lemon juiceOne teaspoonful for three ounces of flour is a seasoning, not a leavening. It sharpens the Parmesan and cuts the richness of the yolks and butter; do not increase it.
- Yield and serviceThe page gives no yield; the quantity of paste is small, enough for a modest number of bite-sized talmouses. Savouries were served hot, one or two per person, at the end of dinner.
The talmouse is one of the older names in French pastry: a small cheese tart, generally traced back through seventeenth-century cookery books to medieval Parisian baking, and long associated by tradition with Saint-Denis. Its defining feature is the three-cornered pinch, and by the nineteenth century the term covered any small savoury case folded that way, cheese or otherwise. Merluche is usually taken to mean hake, though the word was also used of dried cod. Its appearance here reflects a specifically British habit: the savoury course, a hot, salty, often cheese-based mouthful served after the sweet to close a dinner, which professional cooks of the period dressed up in French names even when the raw materials were thoroughly domestic.