Patties, Cheese
INGREDIENTS for 8 patties.- lb. of cheddar cheese, 1 oz. of butter, 1 oz. of flour, pint of milk, 4 eggs, salt and cayenne, some scraps of puff-paste.
AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the paste, 10d.
Rub the butter and flour together, put them with the milk in a pan over the fire, and stir till boiling. Move the pan aside and stir in the yolks of the eggs one by one, then the cheese grated, and lastly the whites of the eggs, well beaten, and the seasoning. Line some patty-pans with the pastry, pour in the mixture, and bake in a quick oven.
TIME.-15 minutes to bake the patties.
SEASONABLE at any time.
PATTIES, FRIED.
Patties, Fried. (Cold Meat Cookery.) -INGREDIENTS.-Cold roast veal, a few slices of cold ham, 1 egg, boiled hard, pounded mace, pepper and salt to taste, gravy, cream, 1 teaspoonful of minced lemon-peel, good puff-paste.
Mince a little cold veal and ham, allowing one-third ham to two-thirds veal; add an egg, boiled hard and chopped, and a seasoning of pounded mace, salt, pepper and lemon-peel; moisten with a little gravy and cream. Make a good puff paste; roll rather thin, and cut it into round or square pieces; put the mince between two of them, pinch the edges to keep in the gravy, and fry a light brown. They may also be baked in pattypans; in that case they should be brushed over with the yolk of an egg before they are put in the oven. To make a variety, oysters may be substituted for the ham.
TIME.-15 minutes to fry the patties.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Patties, etc., Recipes for.- Directions for making the following appear under their respective headings:- Almond Cheesecakes.
Almond Puffs.
Almond Tartlets.
Apple Cheesecakes.
Cheese Patties.
Cheesecakes.
Custard Tartlets.
Fried Patties.
German Puffs.
Lemon Cheesecakes.
To Keep.
Lobster Patties.
Oyster Patties.
Potato Patties.
Tartlets.
Tartlets, Cream.
Tartlets, Polish.
Pea Fritters. (Vegetarian Recipe.) -INGREDIENTS.
Cold brose, or lentil porridge, bread-crumbs, onion, seasoning, flour, oil or butter for frying.
Mix with the cold porridge an equal quantity of bread-crumbs, adding some minced onion and seasoning to taste.
Shape into flat cakes, flour them, and fry a nice brown in oil or butter.
SEASONABLE. A nice little breakfast savoury.
Pea Soup. (Inexpensive.) - INGREDIENTS for soup for 12 persons.-3 onions, 3 carrots, 1 stick of celery, 3/4 lb. of split peas, a little mint, shred fine; 1 tablespoonful of coarse brown sugar, salt and pepper to taste, 4 quarts of water, or liquor in which a joint of meat has been boiled. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Fry the vegetables for 10 minutes in a PEA SOUP. them up into small pieces; pour the water on them, and when boiling add the peas.
Let them simmer for nearly 3 hours, or until the peas are thoroughly done. Add the sugar, seasoning and mint; boil for 1/4 of an hour, and serve.
TIME.-3 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Pea Soup. (Green.) - INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons.-3 pints of green peas, lb. of butter, 2 or 3 thin slices of ham, 3 onions, sliced, 2 shredded lettuces, the crumb of 2 French rolls, 2 handfuls of spinach, 1 lump of sugar, 2 quarts of medium stock. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Put the butter, ham, 1 quart of peas, onions and lettuces to a pint of stock, and simmer for an hour; then add the remainder of the stock, with the crumb of the French rolls, and boil for another hour. Now boil the spinach, and squeeze it very dry. Rub the soup through a sieve, and the spinach with it, to colour it. Have ready a pint of young peas, boiled; add them to the soup, put in the sugar, give one boil and serve.
If necessary, add salt.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE from June to the end of August.
Note. It will be well to add, if the peas are not quite young, a little more sugar. Where economy is essential, water may be used instead of stock for this soup, boiling in it likewise the peashells; but using a double quantity of vegetables. Pea Soup, Winter. (Yellow.) - INGREDIENTS for soup for 12 or 14 persons. -1 quart of split peas, 2 lbs. of shin of beef, trimmings of meat or poultry, a slice of bacon, 2 large carrots, 2 turnips, 5 large onions, 1 head of celery, seasoning to taste, 2 quarts of soft water, any bones left from roast meat, 2 quarts of common stock, or liquor in which a joint of meat has been boiled. AVERAGE COST, 6d. per quart.
Put the peas to soak over-night in soft water and float off such as rise to the top.
Boil them in the water till tender enough to pulp; then add the ingredients mentioned above, and simmer for 2 hours, stirring it occasionally. Pass the whole through a sieve, skim well, season and serve with toasted bread, cut in dice.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year round, but more suitable for cold weather.
Note. A very nice soup can be made with Symington's pea-soup powder, using it according little butter or dripping, previously cutting ❘ to instructions, in place of the split peas. PEACH FRITTERS.
A cheese soufflé mixture baked in pastry cases — closer to a savoury tartlet than to what a modern cook calls a patty. The hinge is folding the beaten whites in last and getting the tins into a properly hot oven before they collapse.
- Quantities that have lost their fractionsThe cheese and the milk are both printed without their fractions. For eight small tartlets a workable set is 4 oz grated cheddar and 1/2 pint (10 fl oz) milk against 1 oz each of butter and flour, though a quarter pint of milk is an equally possible reading of the missing fraction for so few small cases; treat any of these as reconstructions rather than as the book's figures.
- Patty-pansThese are shallow tartlet tins, roughly 2 1/2 in. across, not deep muffin cups. A 12-hole tartlet tray works; line eight of the holes and leave the rest empty.
- A quick oven425–450F (220–230C). The mixture is aerated with beaten whites and needs immediate heat to set the pastry and lift the filling.
- The sauce baseRubbing butter and flour together cold and then bringing them up in the milk is the old blended-roux method. Whisk steadily as it comes to the boil or the flour will catch; the result should be thick enough to coat the spoon heavily.
- Cooling before the yolks"Move the pan aside" means off the heat. Let the sauce stop bubbling before the yolks go in one at a time, or they scramble in the pan.
- Folding the whitesThe book says 'well beaten'; fold them in with a light hand at the last moment. Note that the recipe adds the seasoning at that same final stage, with the whites, after the cheese has gone in.
- Filling and yieldFill the cases about two-thirds full — the mixture rises and then settles. Eight small patties serve four as a first course or savoury, two or three as a light lunch with salad.
- Cheddar and cayenneA dry, well-matured cheddar melts into the sauce without weeping fat; young block cheddar goes greasy. Cayenne here is a seasoning, not a heat element: a pinch, as with a Welsh rarebit.
- TimingFifteen minutes is right at that heat. They are best eaten within a few minutes of leaving the oven, while the filling still stands proud of the pastry.
Small pastry cases filled with a savoury mixture ran through Victorian and Edwardian cookery in dozens of forms — lobster, oyster, veal, potato — and Mrs Beeton's compilers indexed them together as a family. The cheese version belongs to the tradition of the savoury, the hot, sharply seasoned mouthful served at the end of a formal English dinner after the sweets, a course that has since disappeared from the table but survives in things like cheese straws and angels on horseback. Puff-paste trimmings are called for rather than fresh pastry, which places the dish squarely in the economical side of the book: it uses up the scraps left from a larger piece of work, along with cheese and a little milk. The costing of tenpence, exclusive of the paste, is a reminder that these books were written for households keeping accounts.