Beef Patties
Cut fine sufficient of the best part of cold roast beef to make 1 pint and heat in 1 scant cupful of the gravy seasoned with mushroom catsup or Worcestershire. In another saucepan put 1 teaspoonful of grated onion and 4 tablespoonfuls of tarragon vinegar and boil until reduced to 1 tablespoonful. To this add 1 tablespoonful of butter, a dash of salt and pepper and the yolks of 2 eggs and stir over hot water until smooth and very thick. Fill heated pattie cases (or paper ones) with the hot meat, cover with 1 teaspoonful of the sauce and send at once to the table.
A leftovers dish dressed up as a first course: chopped roast beef in its own gravy, spooned into pastry shells and finished with a spoonful of what is essentially a small bearnaise. The hinge is the sauce, which will scramble if it sees direct heat.
- Pattie casesThese are puff-pastry shells, what a French kitchen calls vol-au-vent or bouchees; the "paper ones" are fluted paper cases used for the same purpose. Frozen puff-pastry shells, baked and warmed through, do the job. A pint of chopped meat fills roughly six to eight small cases, enough for four as a light course.
- A pint of meatMeasured by volume, not weight: a US pint of finely chopped cooked beef is roughly 10 to 12 oz. Cut it with a knife rather than a processor, which turns cold roast beef to paste.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, quite unlike tomato ketchup, and still sold by a few British makers. Worcestershire, which the recipe offers as the alternative, is the easier substitute; a teaspoon or two is plenty in a cup of gravy.
- The reductionFour tablespoons of tarragon vinegar with grated onion boiled down to one tablespoon is the classic bearnaise base, minus the tarragon leaves and shallot. It should reduce in two or three minutes in a small pan; watch it, because the last stage goes fast and a scorched reduction cannot be rescued.
- Stir over hot waterA double boiler, with the water below simmering and not touching the bowl. Two yolks and a tablespoon of butter make a very small quantity of sauce that will curdle in seconds over a direct flame. Take it off the heat while it is still moving and it will thicken on residual warmth.
- Butter proportionOne tablespoon of butter to two yolks gives a sauce much leaner and more custard-like than a modern bearnaise, which would use several times that. It is meant as a sharp accent, hence the single teaspoon per pattie, not a blanket of sauce.
- Reheating the beefWarm the meat in the gravy just to steaming. Cooked roast beef chopped fine and simmered will toughen and go grey within a few minutes.
- Timing"Send at once to the table" is not politeness. The shells soften as soon as they are filled and the yolk sauce breaks as it stands, so build the patties only when everyone is seated.
Patties in this sense are the older meaning of the word, from the French pate: a small pastry case holding a savoury filling, served hot as an entree or a supper dish; the flat disc of ground meat that later claimed the name in America is the same word in a later sense. Recipes of this kind fill the economy cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they solved a real problem in a household that roasted a large joint on Sunday: the cold remains could be dignified into something that looked like restaurant cooking, and the pastry case did most of the persuading. The vinegar-and-yolk sauce is a thrifty reading of bearnaise, which culinary tradition attributes to a restaurant at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Le Pavillon Henri IV, around the 1830s, and which had become standard vocabulary in English-language cookbooks by the time this one was written. Mushroom catsup, named alongside Worcestershire here, is often said to have been the more common of the two bottled savourings in English kitchens, and its slow retreat over the twentieth century is why the alternative now reads as the default.