Home › Cold Meat Recipes › Puffs of Meat
Puffs of Meat
1/2 pint (1 cup) milk. 1 heaping tablespoonful (1 oz.) flour. 1 cupful diced roast meat 2 eggs 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1 cupful diced roast meat I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) flour Salt and pepper to taste Beat up the eggs, add them gradually to the flour, then add the milk, meat, salt and pepper, and powder. Divide into buttered cocottes, and bake in a hot oven.
Serve hot.
This is a thin popover-style batter carrying diced cooked meat, baked in individual dishes. The whole thing succeeds or fails on oven heat.
- CocottesSmall individual ovenproof dishes — modern 6 to 8 oz ramekins are the direct equivalent. Butter them generously and set them on a baking sheet for easy handling.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. The batter needs a fast initial heat to set the outside and lift the puff; a moderate oven gives you flat, damp custard instead.
- The flour measureA heaping tablespoon at 1 oz is about 1/4 cup of modern all-purpose flour. That is a very slack batter by design — thinner even than Yorkshire pudding batter, and nothing like a muffin.
- The baking powderA teaspoon is a lot for this quantity of flour and it is not strictly needed; eggs and steam do most of the lifting. Half that amount avoids any bitter aftertaste.
- Duplicated lineThe ingredient list prints "1 cupful diced roast meat" twice. One cup is correct for the quantities given; two would swamp the batter.
- Dice smallCut the meat to roughly 1/2 inch. Larger pieces sink and tear the rising batter. Any cooked roast works — beef, lamb, pork, chicken — as it is only being reheated.
- Don't open the doorBake about 20-25 minutes without opening the oven. Puffs collapse fast, which is why the recipe says serve hot; they are meant to go straight from oven to table.
- YieldEnough for four small cocottes, serving two as a light lunch with a salad or four as a first course.
Cold meat cookery was a whole genre in late Victorian and Edwardian household books, driven by the joint of roast meat that had to feed a family across several days without refrigeration. This treatment uses the same eggs, milk and flour that go under a roast, here baked around its leftovers, though with far less flour in proportion than a Yorkshire pudding batter. In cookery books of this period cocotte was often used for a small individual baking dish rather than the larger casserole, part of the broader French influence on English kitchen vocabulary.