Entrees
2 eggs Bit of bay leaf 1/4 teaspoon peppercorns Cheese Soufflé with Pastry ⅔ cup thick cream ½ cup Swiss cheese, cut in small dice 1/2 cup grated American cheese 1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese Salt and pepper Few grains cayenne Few gratings nutmeg Add eggs to cream and beat slightly, then add cheese and seasonings. Line the sides of ramequin dishes with strips of puff paste. Fill dishes with mixture until two-thirds full. Bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven.
Lamb Rissoles à l'Indienne Roll puff paste one-eighth inch thick and shape, using circular cutters of different sizes. On the centres of smaller pieces put one tablespoon prepared lamb mixture, wet edges, cover with large pieces, press edges firmly together, prick upper paste in several places, brush over with yolk of egg diluted with one teaspoon cold water, and bake in hot oven. Lamb Filling. Cook three tablespoons butter, with a few drops onion juice, until well browned, add one-fourth cup flour, and brown butter and flour, then add one cup lamb stock. Season highly with salt, paprika, and curry powder. To one-half the sauce, add two-thirds cup cold roast lamb cut in one-third inch cubes. Add stock to remaining sauce, and pour around rissoles just before sending to table. 6 quails 6 slices carrot Stalk of celery 2 slices onion Sprig of parsley
Three fragments from the entrée chapter run together here: a cheese soufflé baked in pastry-lined ramekins, curried lamb turnovers, and the opening ingredient list of a quail recipe whose method was lost in the excerpt. The first two are workable; the third is not.
- The missing eggsThe ingredient list omits them, but the method says "Add eggs to cream." Eggs are clearly intended; the quantity is lost with the list. Without them the mixture is only melted cheese and will break.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" in period usage is generally taken as somewhere around 400–450°F. Fifteen minutes should set a shallow ramekin, but check at twelve — the cheese is dense and browns fast.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or double cream, roughly 36% fat and above, as against the "thin cream" of period usage. Not sour cream.
- American cheeseIn 1896 this meant a firm domestic cheddar, not the processed slice. Use a sharp yellow cheddar; the Swiss and Parmesan carry the rest.
- Filling the ramekinsTwo-thirds full is deliberate. This is a cheese custard rather than a whipped soufflé, so it puffs modestly and settles; overfilling makes it weep over the pastry collar.
- Rissoles are baked here, not friedThe word usually means a fried pastry, but this version is egg-washed and oven-baked like a turnover. Keep the paste at an eighth of an inch and prick the tops or steam will blow the seams.
- The lamb sauce is a brown rouxBrowning the butter before adding the flour, then browning both, is the point — it gives the colour and nuttiness the curry powder sits on. Half the sauce binds the filling; the rest is thinned with stock and poured round the plate.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion and press it through a sieve, or use a teaspoon of very finely grated onion. A few drops is genuinely all that is meant.
- Curry powderPeriod curry powder was mild and turmeric-heavy. "Season highly" against a modern blend means starting with a teaspoon and tasting.
- The quail fragmentSix quails, carrot, celery, onion and parsley is the start of a braise or a stock-based preparation, but no method survives in this excerpt. Work from a complete recipe.
- YieldThe recipe states none. The quantities suggest on the order of six to eight small ramekins, and the lamb filling perhaps a dozen or more small rissoles at a tablespoon each.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gave the entrée its own chapter because, in the late-Victorian service she was teaching, an entrée was a specific thing: a small made dish of one or two mouthfuls' substance, served between the fish and the roast, and judged on neatness rather than quantity. That is why so many of these dishes come in a pastry case, a ramekin, or a mould — the format signalled the course. The two dishes here show the range within it. The cheese custard baked in a puff-paste collar is a domesticated cousin of the French soufflé au fromage, with no beaten whites, the eggs and cream simply left to set into a custard instead. À l'indienne simply meant curried, a label attached to any number of French-trained dishes of the period; British and American cooks had absorbed curry powder as a seasoning long before they had much interest in Indian cooking as such, and a curried lamb rissole made from Sunday's cold roast was the respectable way to use leftovers without admitting to it.