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Lemon Patties
Put the grated crumbs of one stale loaf of bread in a basin, and pour over one-half pint of boiling milk. When cold mix in with the grated peel of two lemons, three well-beaten eggs, one-fourth pound of butter beaten to a cream, and sweeten to taste with powdered sugar. Butter some small cups, fill them with the mixture, and bake for twenty minutes or so in a moderate oven. Turn the patties on a hot dish, pour some wine-sauce over, and serve.
A Victorian bread pudding baked in individual moulds and turned out — essentially a lemon-scented panade enriched with butter and eggs. The measurements assume a 19th-century loaf, so judge the batter by feel rather than by weight.
- The loaf is the ambiguous measure"One stale loaf" grated would give roughly 4 to 6 cups of dry crumbs from a modern 1 lb loaf, which is far more than a half pint (1 cup) of milk will moisten. Start with about 2 cups of crumbs to the cup of milk and add more crumbs only until the mixture is thick but still spoonable.
- Half a pintAn American half pint is 1 cup / 8 fl oz. If the mixture stiffens too much as it cools, loosen it with a little more warm milk before the eggs go in.
- A quarter pound of butterThat is 4 oz, one US stick, creamed until pale. Cream it with the sugar rather than beating it in alone — it incorporates far more evenly into a cool crumb mixture that way.
- Sweeten to tastePowdered sugar here means finely ground sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today; granulated or caster works. About 1/2 cup suits the quantities above, more if the wine sauce is dry.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Twenty minutes suits buttered ramekins or a standard muffin tin filled two-thirds full; the patties are done when set at the centre and just shrinking from the sides.
- Small cupsRamekins, dariole moulds or a muffin tin. Butter them thoroughly and let the patties rest two or three minutes before turning out, or the hot custard will slump.
- Lemon peel onlyGrate the zest, not the white pith, and rub it into the sugar before mixing. The oils disperse better and the flavour carries through the bread, which otherwise dulls it.
- Wine sauceA sweet wine-based pouring sauce; period versions range from sherry or madeira warmed with sugar and butter to an egg-yolk, sabayon-style sauce whisked but never boiled. No recipe for it is given on this page.
- YieldRoughly six to eight small patties on the reduced quantities suggested above, enough for four to six as a dessert course; the full loaf as written would make substantially more.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this 1896 volume, drew heavily on the English and French repertoires that governed American hotel cooking of the period. Lemon patties belong to the long line of English bread puddings — grated stale bread swollen in hot milk, then enriched with butter and eggs until it bakes to something between a pudding and a sponge. Baking the mixture in small buttered moulds and unmoulding it for service is what turns a nursery pudding into a hotel dessert; the individual portion, sauced at the last moment, is often associated with restaurant work, though small moulded puddings appear in domestic English cookery too. The wine sauce poured over belongs to the broad family of sweet wine sauces found in Victorian dessert cookery — some thickened with egg, others not — and the whole dish reflects a kitchen economy in which no stale loaf was wasted, even in a hotel of the Waldorf's standing.