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Fritadelles of Beef
Pick all meat off roast beef left over from yesterday and cut it in very small square pieces. Cut also very fine two cold boiled potatoes. Heat an ounce melted butter in a saucepan, add a finely chopped each onion and seeded green pepper, gently brown for five minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile, then sprinkle two tablespoons of flour over and stir well. Moisten with three gills broth, mix well, let boil for ten minutes and add beef and potatoes. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix all well together and let slowly cook for twenty minutes. Add two egg yolks, sharply mix while heating for three minutes, add one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and mix well again. Transfer force to a deep dish, let thoroughly cool off, divide preparation into twelve equal parts, roll out on a lightly floured table into nice cake-like forms, dip lightly in beaten eggs and roll in bread crumbs. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted lard in a frying pan, arrange the fritadelles in one beside another, gently fry for five minutes on each side or till of a nice golden colour, remove, dress on a hot dish and serve with a gill hot tomato sauce separately.
AMUKEE MUTTU (EGG CURRY) Boil twelve fresh eggs for eight minutes, lift up and let slightly cool off. Loosen shells by gently and carefully rolling on a table with the hand without detaching shells, place on a deep dish, cover with salt, let stand for ten hours, shell, cut into quarters lengthwise and keep on a plate till required. Melt a tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add one and a half tablespoons flour and stir a little. Add a small sliced onion, half bean crushed garlic, small. finely chopped apple, half a small, seeded, chopped green pepper, half a chopped chili, a saltspoon each dried bay leaf and thyme, a half teaspoon chopped tarragon, and gently brown for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Moisten with a pint hot water, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, a saltspoon grated nutmeg and teaspoon curry powder. Add a piece lemon rind and one chopped red tomato, mix all well together, let cook for thirty minutes, remove lemon rind and heat eggs at oven door for two minutes. Arrange a rice curry on a hot dish in crown-like form, place eggs in centre, pour contents of pan over eggs and serve.
Two recipes share this page: a bound croquette-cake of leftover roast beef, and an Anglo-Indian egg curry. Both are written in Filippini's clipped professional shorthand, and both depend on measures that have fallen out of use.
- The hinge: cool it completelyThe beef mixture must be chilled until firm before it is shaped, or the cakes will slump and burst in the pan. A deep dish in the refrigerator for two to three hours, or overnight, is what "let thoroughly cool off" is asking for; the original assumed a cold larder.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Three gills of broth is 1½ cups; the gill of tomato sauce served alongside is ½ cup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The nutmeg in the beef and the two saltspoons of cayenne in the curry are ¼ tsp and ½ tsp respectively — that cayenne is assertive, and worth halving on a first attempt.
- "Transfer force to a deep dish""Force" is forcemeat, the bound meat mixture itself, not an instruction.
- Egg yolks off the heatEgg yolks on low heat -- Three minutes of "sharply mix while heating" means the yolks bind the mixture without scrambling. Pull the pan to low heat, stir constantly, and stop as soon as it thickens and pulls from the sides.
- Frying fat and panTwo tablespoons of lard in a heavy skillet is a shallow fry, not a deep one. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works; keep the heat at medium so five minutes a side browns rather than scorches, and fry in batches so the cakes are not crowded.
- Green pepper and chiliThe "green pepper" of 1906 American cookery is a sweet bell pepper. The separate "half a chopped chili" in the curry is the hot element; a single serrano or a fresh green chili is the right scale.
- The ten-hour salting of the eggsCracking the shells and burying hard-boiled eggs in salt overnight seasons them through the fissures. It is a flavouring step, not a preservation one — keep them refrigerated during the stand rather than on the counter.
- YieldTwelve fritadelles serve four to six as a main course. The curry, at twelve eggs, serves six over rice; the rice "in crown-like form" is simply a ring moulded around the edge of the platter.
Fritadelle is one of many spellings of the pan-fried meat cake that runs across northern Europe — Frikadelle in Germany, frikadeller in Denmark, frikadel in the Low Countries and, by way of Dutch trade, in Indonesia. The word is generally traced to the same root as Italian frittella, a small fried thing, and the dish has always been an economy: yesterday's roast, a starch to stretch it, egg yolk to bind, crumbs to give it a crust. Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, included it in his International Cook Book, which gathered dishes from everywhere he could reach — which is why a German-Scandinavian leftover cake turns up in the same volume as an egg curry carrying a Tamil-flavoured title. That range is the period showing itself: an American hotel kitchen at the turn of the century, confident that every national cuisine could be reduced to a paragraph of French professional technique and set in a row.