Home › Savoury Entremets › Savoury Entremets: Yarmouth
Savoury Entremets: Yarmouth
Pailles à la Yarmouth are straws of pastry made with bloater paste.
Paupiettes à la Yarmouth are fillets of bloaters, stuffed, rolled, and served on toast.
Laitances à la Diable is devilled roe. It is served on toast. à la Madras-small pieces of roe, wrapped in little slices of bacon with capers and chutney, and served on toast. Chickens' livers are dressed in this way as Foies de volaille à la Diable.
Tomates en mascarade are little moulds of rice, the centres filled with a purée of tomatoes; served with a cheese sauce.
Pailles à l'Américaine are straws of pastry mado with tomato sauce.
Pompadours à la Portugaise are little rolls of cheese pastry filled with tomato cream.
Marrons en mascarade are braised chestnuts, coated with a savoury forcemeat, and then half with grated ham and half with grated cheese; served in paper cases, a red and white one in each case.
Croquettes à la Mancelle are little croquettes made of chestnuts with white sauce, grated cheese, etc.
Roasted chestnuts may also be devilled and served in little cases as Marrons à la Diable. Walnuts, almonds or raisins may be served in this way. Pommes en kari are curried apples.
Petits soufflés piquants are little savoury soufflés with chopped herbs. Highly seasoned with cayenne pepper, etc., they are called. Petits soufflés à la Diable. à la Yarmouth are bloater soufflés.
Petites gelées aux fines herbes are little moulds of aspic with chopped mushrooms and herbs.
Petites caisses à l'Algérienne are French plums stuffed with foie gras, or other rich forcemeat, served in little cases. à la Tunis are dates dressed in the same way. à la Florence-little cases filled with a purée of dried haddock covered with a savoury meringue. à la Westphalie are filled with a purée of ham, and garnished with slices of red and white radishes, and chopped parsley.
Croûtes à la Campagne-croûtes garnished with anchovy purée in a rose design, sprinkled with chopped parsley. à la Française are garnished with anchovy, cheese and parsley butter, with caviar in the centre. à la Russe are spread with a cream of horseradish. à l'Indienne are spread with a highly seasoned mixture of buttered eggs with chopped capers, anchovy, etc. à l'Italienne have slices of beetroot on them and rings of white and yolk of hard-boiled egg, an olive in the centre with an anchovy curled round it. à l'Écossaise-Scotch woodcock on toast. à la Jubilé have a purée of dried haddock piled on them, with an oyster in the centre covered with the purée. à la Marjorie are spread with a purée of dried haddock and garnished with hard-boiled egg.
Everything on this page is small, salty, and sitting on a piece of toast or in a paper case. These are the savouries, served at the end of an English dinner, and the whole chapter is built out of the store cupboard.
- This course came after the sweetA savoury closed an English formal dinner, which is why nothing here is a dish in its own right and nothing takes more than two bites. If you are looking for a place to use these, it is the moment a modern table reaches for cheese.
- Dried haddock is the hidden stapleThree separate entries, à la Florence, à la Jubilé and à la Marjorie, are built on a purée of dried haddock, under meringue, under an oyster, or under chopped egg. Undyed smoked haddock, poached and beaten with butter, gives you the purée; the dyed yellow kind will make all three look wrong.
- Bloater paste is still soldWhich makes the pastry straws and the bloater soufflés the most achievable things on the page. A bloater is a whole herring, ungutted and lightly smoked, and the paste made from it is saltier and more strongly flavoured than anything made from kipper.
- The name follows the dried fruitÀ l’Algérienne is a French plum stuffed with foie gras; à la Tunis is the same thing made with a date. The geography is tracking the fruit shelf, not a cuisine, and the two entries are otherwise identical.
- Everything can be made in advanceAspic moulds, stuffed prunes, cheese pastry, chestnut croquettes, pastes spread on croûtes. Not one item on this page requires last-minute cooking, which is exactly why a hostess could offer twenty of them at the end of a long meal.
- Curried apples, in two wordsPommes en kari gets no further explanation at all. Where the book is this brief it is not hiding anything; the reader was expected to curry an apple the way she curried everything else, and the page is only reminding her that it could be served here.
This page is a portrait of a well-stocked store cupboard rather than of a kitchen garden. Anchovy, bloater paste, caviar, chutney, capers, dried haddock, French plums, dates, preserved ginger, Parmesan and tinned tomato purée are all preserved goods that kept for months and came from a grocer or from abroad, and the variety on the page depends entirely on them. The presentation is doing the rest of the work: little paper cases, red and white halves of the same chestnut in each case, radishes sliced into patterns, an anchovy curled round an olive, a rose design piped in anchovy purée. For a course served after the pudding, when the appetite had gone, what mattered was that the plate looked like an ornament and that the taste was sharp enough to register.