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Patty-Pan Pies
H Cut any remnants of baked or boiled lamb or mutton in small pieces, discarding all bone and gristle. Season with salt, pepper, and a little onion-juice if desired. For two cups of such meat allow one cup of any left-over gravy diluted with a little hot water, or one cup of good stock made from the bones and bits of meat, flavored with vegetables, and thickened with one tablespoonful of flour. Heat meat and gravy together. Line patty-pans with good plain pastry, rolled rather thin. Fill with the warm meat and cover with pastry. Bake in rather a moderate oven until the pastry is cooked, about half an hour. Each patty makes an individual portion, and can be served with or without brown sauce (see page 68).
A straightforward individual meat pie built from Sunday's roast. The only real technical demand is getting the filling thick and cool enough that it does not flood the pastry.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tins for individual pastries, roughly the size of a modern muffin or cupcake cup. A standard 12-cup muffin tin or a set of 3-inch tartlet tins works; the recipe as written fills about six to eight.
- "Rather a moderate oven"The recipe gives no temperature. Moderate in period usage is usually taken as somewhere around 350F, and "rather a moderate oven" reads as approximately that rather than hotter; anything in the moderate range that cooks the pastry through in about half an hour will answer.
- Thicken properly, then coolThicken properly -- one tablespoon of flour to a cup of liquid gives a loose sauce. Cook it out for a couple of minutes so it does not taste raw. The recipe says to fill with the warm meat; if the filling is very hot and thin the bottom crust may soften, so letting it cool a little first is a reasonable precaution.
- Onion-juiceAn old shortcut: a grated onion pressed through cheesecloth, giving flavour with no visible pieces. A teaspoon of grated onion, or a small quantity of onion softened in butter and finely chopped, does the same job.
- Stock from the bonesThe bone-and-scrap stock the recipe suggests is worth the trouble with lamb, which gives a strongly flavoured broth in an hour or two. Skim the fat off before using it, since roast lamb drippings are generous.
- Cutting the meatAlready-cooked lamb will not tenderise further in half an hour of baking. Cut it small, about a half-inch dice, so it is not stringy in the mouth, and trim hard fat along with the gristle.
- Sealing and ventingDampen the pastry rim before laying on the lid and press it down, then cut a small slit in each top. Without a vent the steam lifts the lid and the gravy escapes at the seam.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of meat with a cup of gravy fills six to eight patties, one apiece as a main course with a vegetable. The brown sauce is optional; the pies are already saucy inside.
Books of this kind, published in the decades either side of 1900, existed because a middle-class household roasted a whole leg or shoulder and then faced it again on Monday and Tuesday. Thrift was a stated domestic virtue, and the left-over cookery genre turned it into a system: rehash, croquette, shepherd's pie, and the small covered pie in a patty-pan. "Patty" here is generally traced to the French pâté, though the derivation is a scholarly guess rather than a settled fact, and a patty-pan was simply the tin the little pastry case was baked in, long before the word attached itself to a ground-meat disc. The individual portion mattered socially as well as practically — a single-serving pie reads as a dish cooked deliberately, while a bowl of reheated lamb reads as yesterday's dinner. Lamb and mutton were worth attention because mutton was still common on English and American tables, stronger in flavour than modern lamb and all the better for being cut small and cloaked in gravy and pastry.