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Shrimp Patties
Prepare and keep hot six patties. Place thirty-six shelled, cooked shrimps in a frying pan with two tablespoons sherry and cook for five minutes. Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons butter with two and a half tablespoons flour and heat for half minute. Pour in one gill each milk and cream, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix until it comes to a boil, then add the shrimps to pan, lightly mix and cook for five minutes more. Dilute and egg yolk in a tablespoon cream and add to the shrimps and mix while heating for two minutes. Remove, dress on a large dish, divide the shrimps evenly into the six patties, arrange the covers on top and serve.
A shrimp cream filling served in pastry shells, from an era when "patties" meant the case rather than the contents. Two details matter most: the sauce must not boil after the yolk goes in, and the shrimp are already cooked before they ever reach the pan.
- "Patties" are pastry casesThese are petits pâtés or vol-au-vent shells with their own lids — small rounds of puff pastry baked hollow, then filled. Frozen puff pastry shells, baked and kept warm, do the same job; the "covers" are the little caps you lift off.
- A gill is half a cupOne gill each milk and cream gives 1 cup of liquid total against 1½ tablespoons butter and 2½ tablespoons flour — a thick sauce by modern proportions, with more flour than butter, and the yolk thickens it further.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cayenne is ½ teaspoon, which is genuinely hot for a cup of cream sauce; start with a quarter of that and add to taste. The nutmeg at ¼ teaspoon is right.
- The yolk must not boilThe liaison of yolk slackened in a tablespoon of cream is the hinge of the dish. Once it goes in, hold the pan below a simmer for the two minutes given — a boil scrambles the yolk and the sauce turns grainy.
- Ten minutes is too long for cooked shrimpThe shrimp are already cooked when they enter the pan, then get five minutes in sherry and another five in the sauce. Modern practice: reduce the sherry on its own, add the shrimp only at the end, and give them a minute or two to heat through.
- Thirty-six shrimpSix per shell suggests small shrimp — thirty-six peeled shrimp at 40–50 count works out to roughly three-quarters of a pound. Larger shrimp will overfill the cases; halve them lengthwise if using anything bigger.
- Cook the flour properlyHalf a minute is barely enough to take the raw edge off the roux. Give it a full two minutes over low heat before the milk goes in.
- YieldSix patties, enough for six as a first course or three as a light supper. Fill at the last moment or the pastry softens.
Filled pastry cases were a fixture of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table, sitting somewhere between the entrâke and the savoury, and cookbooks of the period seem generally to have assumed the reader either bought the shells from a baker or had a standing puff-pastry recipe elsewhere in the book — hence the brisk "prepare and keep hot six patties" with no further instruction. The filling here is a classic cream sauce finished with an egg-yolk liaison, the French technique that gives body and gloss without more flour, and the sherry, cayenne and nutmeg are often said to be a common seasoning combination for shellfish in Anglo-American cookery of the time. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe's proportions and phrasing carry the marks of a restaurant kitchen: exact shrimp counts, exact minute timings, and an assumption that the pastry work has already been done by someone else.