Home › The World's Kitchen › Small Patties, Suedoise
Small Patties, Suedoise
Prepare and keep hot six patties. Cut a pound of smoked, well-trimmed salmon in one-third-inch-square pieces, plunge in a pint boiling water for five minutes and drain well on a sieve. Mix in saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter and two heavy tablespoons flour, then briskly stir on fire for one minute. Pour in a gill each milk and cream, add a teaspoon anchovy essence, three saltspoons salt and a saltspoon cayenne. Sharply mix with a whisk until it comes to a boil, then let boil for ten minutes. Add salmon, with a tablespoon capers, lightly mix and cook for two minutes. Arrange the six patties on a large hot dish, spread a half teaspoon caviare at bottom of each patty, evenly pour preparation into them, place covers on, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve.
A hot smoked-salmon filling in pastry shells, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen around 1900. Two things need translating before you start: what a "patty" is, and what the saltspoon measures mean.
- "Patties" means pastry casesThese are baked puff-pastry shells with lids — bouchées or small vol-au-vents — not meat patties. Frozen puff pastry shells, baked and kept warm, do the job; the lids go back on after filling.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and the cayenne is a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- Blanching the salmon is deliberateFive minutes in boiling water draws out salt and smoke and firms the dice so they hold their shape in the sauce. Skip it and the filling risks turning aggressively salty, particularly with anchovy essence and caviare also in play. Much modern smoked salmon is lightly cured, so taste the sauce before adding the full 3/4 teaspoon salt.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty bottled anchovy extract still sold in Britain; anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a scant teaspoon of colatura or Asian fish sauce, stands in.
- Ten minutes of boilingThat is a long simmer for a small quantity of béchamel, and it exists to cook out the flour and reduce the sauce to a coating thickness. Use low heat, a heavy pan and a whisk, or it will catch and scorch; if it tightens too far, loosen with a spoonful of milk.
- The salmon goes in lastTwo minutes is all it gets, and that is right — already-cured, already-blanched salmon dries out and shreds with further cooking.
- Caviare at the bottomThe half teaspoon goes under the filling rather than on top, so the hot sauce is poured over it. Any good roe works — salmon keta, lumpfish, trout — and since heat spoils its texture, fill the shells at the last moment.
- Yield and timingSix patties, so a first course for six or a light lunch for three. Bake and warm the shells while the sauce boils; assembled patties soften within a few minutes and should go straight to the table.
"À la suédoise" — Swedish style — was one of the standing national tags in the classical French repertoire. In a savoury context it could point to the Scandinavian larder — smoked salmon, anchovy, caviare, sometimes beetroot or dill — though the label was used loosely and elsewhere attached to quite different things, from a horseradish-and-apple mayonnaise to a moulded fruit dessert. This filling hits three of the Scandinavian markers at once. The recipe belongs to the era when a hot pastry bouchée was a standard vehicle for any rich bound mixture, from sweetbreads to lobster, and the cook's interest lay in the sauce rather than the shell.