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Lemon Patties
May be made as above and filled with the lemon butter, number 39, or lemon paste.
This is a one-line variation that leans entirely on the preceding entry and on the lemon butter numbered elsewhere in the book. Read it as an instruction to bake empty pastry cases and fill them with lemon curd once both are cold.
- "Patties" means the pastry, not a burgerIn a pastry book of this period a patty is a small round shell of puff paste, baked in or over a patty pan, later filled. The nearest modern equivalents are a vol-au-vent case or a tartlet shell; the recipe gives no dimensions.
- Find the recipe "above"The method is whatever shaping and baking instruction immediately precedes this line in the book, which is not reproduced here. Nothing in this entry works without it.
- Lemon butter is lemon curd"lemon butter" in books of this period is the cooked mixture of eggs, sugar, lemon juice and zest, and butter, thickened over gentle heat, now sold as lemon curd. "Lemon paste" is a separate preparation named but not described here.
- Fill cold, and lateCurd in a warm shell weeps and softens the pastry. Cool the cases completely, cool the filling completely, and fill as close to serving as the kitchen allows.
- Curd needs to be cooked properlyLemon butter is an egg custard and should be taken to about 170F, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon heavily. Below that it stays thin and does not keep; above about 180F it scrambles.
- YieldThe original gives none, since it depends on the shell recipe.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men working the pastry bench in American hotels and restaurants. The dish itself sits in a long line of small filled puff-paste cases, generally traced to the French petit pâté and the vol-au-vent, which nineteenth-century American kitchens borrowed and filled. Lemon curd, called lemon butter or lemon cheese in period books, was a staple of that filling repertoire.