Vampire Dinner Party Bill of Fare (~1850s)

Notes from a project from November: a period-inspired dinner party for 7, in a "vampire" setting. I chose to interpret this as "Romantic Era", vaguely leaning more into the 1850s because that's where I have more recipes to work from. A few dishes are from Beeton's, which is technically 1861, but there's fairly good evidence that the recipes themselves are older.

 When I did my first independent dinner party (Candlelight, all those years ago), I got a little crazy analyzing menu patterns. Beeton, for instance, in the various dinner party suggestions, tends to break down into "1 dish per 2 guests per course". This is always way too much food for modern diners in my experience, so I ended up following "Lady Maria Clutterbuck's" plans in What shall we have for dinner? (1852). Looking over menus throughout the year, this book give a total of 7-10 dishes for a party of six or seven people. This amounts to: 1 soup or fish dish, occassionally both; 2 meat dishes and 2 vegetable dishes (sometimes with a third of one or the other); and finally 1-2 sweet dishes with 1-2 savory.

Bill of Fare

Soup a la Julienne [Beeton]
Very Good Rolls [Beeton]
Beef ala Mode [Beeton]
Boiled Celery with White Sauce [sauce from Mrs. Rundel's]
Pork Cutlets
Potatoes in the German Fashion
Quince Jelly  [Mrs. Putnam's]
Chicken Croquettes
Egg Salad
Meringues
Jelly in Oranges (blackberry jelly)

By using gluten-free breadcrumbs on the croquettes, some flour substitute, and omitting the beer in the gravy, I was able to make everything except the rolls gluten-free. The dishes which aren't explicitly meat-containing were made vegetarian (but still with eggs and dairy) through meatless gravy and stocks, and substituting agar for gelatin/isinglass (and omitting the chicken on one salad).