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Dresden Patties
Take I long loaf of stale baker's bread fully two days old. Trim off all crust, then cut in slices fully two inches thick.
With a medium-sized cutter stamp out as many round pieces as will be needed. Beat 2 eggs, add a pinch of salt and 1 pint of milk. Stand the rounds in a deep dish and pour this raw custard over and around them. Let stand until they have soaked as fully as possible without danger of breaking, then lift out carefully and drain for fifteen minutes. Beat 1 egg just enough to break the stringiness. Dip each pattie in this, then roll in fine dry bread crumbs. Have ready a kettle partly filled with smoking hot fat.
Carefully put in 1 or 2 at a time and fry quickly golden brown. Lift out, drain for a moment on soft paper; then with a sharp pointed knife cut a circle in the top of each and lift it out, leaving a border an inch all around. With a spoon dig out the greater part of the soft center. These pattie cases may be filled with meat or fish cut fine and heated in a very thick sauce.
A bread-based substitute for pastry vol-au-vents: rounds of stale bread soaked in custard, breaded, deep-fried and hollowed into cases. The whole thing hinges on the bread being dry enough to drink the custard without collapsing.
- The breadThe recipe specifies only a "long loaf of baker's bread"; what is wanted is a close-crumbed loaf rather than an open, airy one, which will not hold a two-inch round. Two days of staling is not optional — the recipe insists on it, and fresh bread turns to paste in the custard.
- Cutter size"Medium-sized" is not defined. Bear in mind that the recipe's one-inch border all around uses up two inches of diameter, so the round must be appreciably wider than that to leave any cavity. A plain round cookie cutter or a clean tin can works.
- The custard is a soak, not a batterTwo eggs to a pint of milk is a very loose custard, deliberately so. The recipe gives no time: watch the rounds rather than the clock, and stop short of the point where they will break in lifting.
- Draining mattersThe fifteen minutes of draining is what keeps the crumb coating from sliding off and stops the fat spitting. Set them on a rack, not on a plate where they sit in released milk.
- Fat temperature"Smoking hot" is misleading by modern standards — fat that actually smokes is past its point of use. Aim for 360-375°F and fry one or two at a time, as the recipe directs, so the temperature does not crash; the recipe asks only that they be fried quickly to golden brown.
- Hollowing them outCut and lift the lid while they are still hot, and scoop with a teaspoon. The interior will be soft custard-soaked crumb; leave a thin layer on the base or the filling will leak through.
- The filling"A very thick sauce" is the whole point — a stiff béchamel-bound mince of chicken, ham, or flaked cooked fish. Anything loose will soften the case within minutes, so fill at the last moment and serve at once.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; it depends entirely on the length of the loaf and the cutter, since the loaf is cut in two-inch slices and stamped into rounds.
Dresden patties belong to a long line of frugal substitutes for puff pastry cases, which demanded good butter, cool hands and time — all scarce in a working household. Hollowed fried bread had long served a similar purpose, as in the croustade; here the bread is first enriched with a milk-and-egg soak, so the case eats closer to pastry than to toast. German place names attached to fussy little dishes of this kind were a common nineteenth-century flourish and need not point to any documented Saxon original. The case is there to stretch a small quantity of chopped meat or fish into something that arrives at the table looking like a course from a much larger kitchen.