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Dresden Patties
Take three ounces of any kind of cold boiled fish, trim off the skin and bone and chop the fish fine. Put one ounce of butter into a flat stewpan with a tablespoonful of flour, stir over the fire until mixed, then pour in a teacupful of milk, and continue stirring. Put the fish into the boiling milk, season to taste with salt and pepper, and cook over a slow fire for fifteen minutes. Cut two large rounds of bread about four inches in diameter and one and one-half inches in thickness and with a three-inch tin cutter cut half way through each. Dip the rounds well in cream, then drain, and dip them in well beaten egg. Season a small plate of finely grated breadcrumb with salt and pepper, and roll the rounds in them, giving a good coating. Put a large lump of clarified fat or lard into a fryingpan, place it over the fire till blue smoke rises, then put in the rounds and fry them till lightly browned. Take them out of the fat with a slice, and lay them on a sheet of kitchen paper to drain for a few minutes. Lift off the inner round of bread with a sharp knife, and scoop out from the center of the large round, all the soft bread. Fill the hollows with the fish mixture, and put the small rounds on top. Place the patties on a hot dish, over which has been spread a folded napkin or an ornamental dish-paper, garnish with a few neat sprigs of fried parsley, and serve while very hot.
A bread-case croustade filled with creamed fish — an Edwardian way of dressing up yesterday's boiled halibut or cod. Most of the work is in the bread, and the frying is where it goes wrong.
- YieldTwo patties, which is a light lunch for two people or a first course for two. The filling scales cleanly if you want four.
- A teacupfulVariously reckoned at 5 to 6 fl oz, i.e. two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup. With 1 oz butter and a tablespoon of flour that starts as a medium sauce and reduces over the cooking to something thick enough to spoon rather than pour, which is what you want inside a bread case.
- Fifteen minutes is for the sauce, not the fishFifteen minutes -- The fish is already cooked, though the recipe does put it into the milk for the whole fifteen minutes. Much of that time is cooking the raw flour taste out of the roux and reducing the sauce to a binding consistency. If you prefer, build and thicken the sauce first and fold the fish in for the last two or three minutes only, so it does not shred to paste.
- "Till blue smoke rises"That is a nineteenth-century doneness cue for lard and it runs hotter than you need — visible blue smoke from lard is roughly 375F and climbing. Fry at 350–360F; the crumb coating browns in about two minutes a side and the bread beneath stays dry.
- The breadYou need a firm, close-grained white loaf, uncut, at least a day old. Modern sandwich bread will not give you a 1½-inch round that holds its shape through a cream dip and a fat bath. The inner 3-inch cut goes halfway down only — it becomes the lid.
- Dip brieflyBread absorbs cream almost instantly. A moment in the cream, a firm drain, then straight into the egg and crumbs. Soaked-through rounds collapse in the pan and drink fat.
- Clarified fatClarified butter, lard or a neutral high-smoke oil all work. Whole butter will not survive the temperature.
- Fried parsleyThe sprigs must be bone dry before they meet the fat — shake and blot them well. Wet parsley in hot lard spits violently. A few seconds is enough; it should stay green.
- SeasoningCold boiled fish is bland and the bread case is bland. Season the sauce more assertively than feels right, and a scrape of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon in the filling is period-appropriate and welcome.
This is leftovers cookery wearing evening dress. A croustade — a hollowed, fried or baked bread case standing in for pastry — was a standard hotel and household device for turning three ounces of cold fish into something that could be sent out on a folded napkin, and the same method appears across late Victorian and Edwardian English and American books under names like bread cases, croustades and patties. The Dresden label belongs to a period fashion for attaching European city names to garnished dishes; it is generally taken to evoke the neat, porcelain-like presentation rather than any Saxon original, and no specific origin for it is documented. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder that the Waldorf kitchen, for all its terrapin and canvasback, ran on the same arithmetic as any large establishment: cold fish from yesterday's service had to reappear tomorrow looking like it had been made on purpose.