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Dresden Patties
Cut stale bread in two-inch slices, shape with a round cutter three inches in diameter, and remove centres, making cases. Dip cases in egg, slightly beaten, diluted with milk and seasoned with salt, allowing two tablespoons milk to each egg. When bread is thoroughly soaked, drain, and fry in deep fat. Fill with any mixture suitable for patty cases. 1 pint oysters 3 tablespoons butter 4½ tablespoons flour 1/2 cup chicken stock 1/2 cup cream
This is a fried bread case — a cheap stand-in for puff-pastry vol-au-vents — with a creamed oyster filling to go inside it. The bread work is the whole trick; the filling is a plain velouté finished with cream.
- The hinge: bread must be staleFresh bread collapses in the egg dip and soaks up fat like a sponge. Use a firm white loaf left uncovered a day, cut a full two inches thick so the case has walls.
- Cutting the casesA 3-inch round cutter for the outside, then a smaller cutter pressed in most of the way down but not through, so a floor remains; the recipe does not give the inner diameter. Note that the recipe removes the centres at this stage, before the egg dip, not after frying.
- Egg dip proportionsTwo tablespoons milk to each egg, salted, as the recipe directs; no yield or egg count is given. Soak until wet through but not falling apart, then drain on a rack rather than paper so the surface stays even.
- Deep fat temperatureAround 375F. The recipe says only 'fry in deep fat'; Farmer's general fat tests elsewhere gauge readiness by how quickly a bread cube browns. Too cool and the cases absorb fat; too hot and they colour before the interior sets.
- Oysters go in lastPoach shucked oysters in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, about two minutes, then lift them out. Oysters held in a hot sauce turn firm and shrunken; add them to the finished sauce off the heat.
- The sauceThree tablespoons butter with the four and a half tablespoons flour, cooked a minute, then the half cup chicken stock and half cup cream whisked in. Season with salt, white pepper and a little cayenne. The recipe gives no yield.
- Fill at the table's edgeFill at the last moment -- Fried bread softens quickly once wet. Keep the cases warm in a very low oven and spoon the filling in as they go out; the recipe itself gives no holding instruction.
Fannie Farmer's book is full of these economies dressed as elegance: the patty case was a fixture of late-Victorian entrée service, and puff paste was slow, temperamental work for a household cook. Cutting cases from stale bread, soaking them in egg and milk and frying them gave the same silhouette on the plate in a fraction of the time, using up the end of the loaf besides. The "Dresden" label is probably decorative rather than geographic — American cookbooks of the 1890s attached German and French place names freely to fried and moulded garnishes, in the same spirit that produced Dresden china patterns on the sideboard. That the filling here is creamed oysters says something about the period too: oysters were still cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast, and appear throughout this book in a great many preparations.