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Egg Patties
Make the pastry first, and line some patty tins. Mix a spoonful of butter, one of chopped spring onions, one of fried bread crumbs, some chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Put a layer of this mixture in the bottom of each patty tin; then break white of egg into each. Put a little chili vinegar and parsley on top of each white, and cook gently in the oven. A slow oven is the best.
A short, oddly modern little savoury: pastry cases filled with a seasoned crumb base and an egg white set slowly in the oven. The original assumes you already have leftover whites and a working knowledge of shortcrust.
- The hinge: low heatEgg white toughens and turns rubbery fast. "A slow oven" means about 300F, and the whites should be taken out while barely set and still trembling, roughly 12-18 minutes depending on tin size.
- Blind-bake the shellsThe original fills the lined tins and bakes once, but at so low a heat the pastry is unlikely to colour or crisp before the filling overcooks. If you prefer a crisp case, line the tins, bake them blind in a hotter oven until dry and pale gold, then fill and return them to the slow oven.
- "A spoonful"The original does not say what size of spoon, though a tablespoon is the usual reading; the quantities are clearly per batch rather than per tin, since the mixture is combined first and then divided. About 1 tbsp each of butter, chopped spring onion and fried crumbs will give a thin layer in a handful of small patty tins; scale up if you want more than a scraping in each.
- Patty tinsDeep tartlet or muffin-top tins of about 2 to 2 1/2 inches. A standard 12-cup muffin tin is deeper than intended; the whites will pool and take longer to set.
- Fried bread crumbsFresh crumbs fried in butter until crisp and nut-brown, not dry packaged crumbs. They are there to keep the base from going sodden as the white weeps.
- Chili vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies. A few drops of any hot pepper vinegar, or cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne, does the same job.
- Whites aloneWithout the yolk there is no richness at all, so the butter, onion and salt carry the dish. Season the crumb mixture more assertively than you think necessary.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no yield; a batch of this size will fill only a few small patty tins. Serve immediately, as reheated egg white is unpleasant.
Recipes of this period regularly left cooks with spare whites -- custards, curds, rich sauces, mayonnaise and yolk-rich cakes all take yolks and leave whites behind -- and collections of uses for them were a familiar form of thrift in a household where eggs were bought by the dozen. This particular dish is a small hot savoury of the kind more often built on anchovy, ham or kidney, here made instead from pastry, crumbs, onion and a single unbeaten white, with chili vinegar supplying the sharpness. Chili vinegar itself was a common bottled condiment of the period, generally used the way a modern cook reaches for hot sauce.