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Zigaras à la Russe
Make and fry same as Cigarettes à la Prince Henry, using cheese mixture in place of Chicken Force-meat. Melt two tablespoons butter, add four tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one-half cup milk, then add one tablespoon heavy cream, one egg yolk, and one-third cup grated cheese. Season highly with salt and cayenne. Cool before spreading on paste.
This is a cross-reference recipe: the filling is given in full, the wrapper and cooking method are borrowed from the preceding entry for Cigarettes à la Prince Henry, which calls for thin paste rolled around the filling into small cigars and fried in deep fat. A few points make it work without the other page in front of you.
- The filling is a panada, not a sauceTwo tablespoons butter to four tablespoons flour with only half a cup of milk gives a paste stiff enough to stand a spoon in. That is deliberate — it must hold its shape when spread and rolled. Do not loosen it to sauce consistency or the cigars will burst in the fat.
- Cool it completelyThe instruction to cool before spreading is the hinge of the recipe. Warm filling softens the paste, and a soft wrapper will not seal. Spread it on a plate, cover, and chill until firm.
- The pasteThe wrapper is the thin paste of the preceding cigarette recipe, rolled very thin and cut into small rectangles; no dimensions are given on this page. Store-bought puff pastry, rolled thinner than it comes, does the job.
- SealingBrush the far edge with beaten egg or water, roll tightly, and press the ends closed. Any gap and the cheese leaks out and scorches the fat.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature for the deep fat; in practice hot fat around 375F works, and the period's usual guide is a cube of bread browning in the fat in well under a minute. They need only two to three minutes to color; longer and the wrapper darkens before the center heats through.
- The cheese'Grated cheese' is left unspecified here; a dry aged cheddar or Parmesan behaves best, as a young, high-moisture cheese will make the filling greasy and slack. Weigh it if you can: a third of a cup grated is roughly 1 to 1.5 oz depending on the grater.
- Season highlyNot a flourish. A flour-and-milk base swallows salt, and the filling is tasted cold but eaten hot, which flattens it further. Salt and cayenne until it tastes slightly too strong on the cold spoon.
- YieldThe quantities given make about a cup of filling, enough for 12 to 16 small cigars — a first course for four to six, or a plate of hot hors d'oeuvres. Serve straight from the fat; they go leathery as they sit.
The name belongs to the period's habit of naming a filling rolled in thin paste and fried to a brown cylinder after the tobacco shape: zigaras, cigarettes, cigares all appear in this sense, though the route by which the spelling zigaras arrived is not clear. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives several in a row — chicken forcemeat, cheese — and expects the cook to hold one method in mind and swap the interior, which is why this entry is three lines of filling and no cooking instructions at all. The "à la Russe" tag was applied loosely in American and English kitchens of the period, and what it signals here is not evident from the recipe. Small fried cheese entrées of this kind belong to the fashion for the fussy hot savory, a dish that used up a spoonful of cream and an egg yolk and made an impression out of very little.