2 lbs. minced beef
Ground with fat
2 bunches each containing about 4 sprigs of fresh thyme
Annatto seeds for colouring or 1 full teaspoon paprika
Half loaf of French style bread
1/2 tsp. Accent or Chinese Ve-Tsin powder
2 oz. escallion
2 sm. hot Jamaican peppers or dried Tabasco peppers to taste
1 tsp. salt

Grind escallion and hot peppers in a mincing mill. Add to ground meat with salt. Place meat in a saucepan making a well in the center into which place 1 bundle of thyme. Cook without adding any water or fat until meat has lost its broth and only a little oil remains. Pour off excess oil and add this to the Annatto seeds to be used later on, strained, for colouring meat.

While meat is being cooked, pour sufficient cold water over bread in a saucepan to cover and soak for a few minutes, then squeeze dry, saving water. Pass bread through mincing mill and return the ground bread to the water with a bundle of thyme and cook until bread is quite dry. Combine meat and cooked bread. Add color, either annatto seed oil, or paprika in sufficient quantity to color the meat to taste and cook together for a further 20 minutes. Add Accent or Ve-Tsin powder. Remove from fire. Cool for filling pastry circles.

PASTRY FOR BEEF PATTIES:

11 oz. suet
1 level tsp. salt
4 c. flour
2/3 c. iced water

Trim all skin and fatty membrane from suet and set overnight in freezer. Next day with a very sharp knife, shave suet as finely as possible. Combine salt and flour, then work in suet as you would shortening in plain pastry, cutting it in with two knives. Add iced water in just sufficient quantity to have a dough which can be rolled out. Form into a ball and with a rolling pin, pat gently, turning the dough over once or twice just in order to have it all properly held together. Set overnight wrapped in wax paper in freezer or icebox.

Next day, pull off small pieces of the dough (after defrosting) sufficiently large to roll into a circle the size of a breakfast saucer. Dip dough in flour before rolling.

Roll quite thin and cut a perfect circle by using a saucer for shape. In the center of each circle place a spoonful of meat, fold dough over to form a crescent shape and seal edges either with egg white or by crimping edge and folding dough slightly under. Do not prick the pastry. Bake on ungreased tin sheets in a hot oven for about 35 minutes. This recipe will make roughly 3 dozen regular patties.