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Potato Rissoles
Mash potatoes, salt and pepper to taste, if desired add a little parsley. Roll the potatoes into small balls, cover them with an egg and bread-crumbs, and fry in hot lard for about two minutes. Finely minced tongue or ham may be added with good effect, or even chopped onions when liked.
A short, forgiving recipe that depends almost entirely on the moisture of the mashed potato and the heat of the fat. Both are worth controlling before you start rolling.
- Start with dry, stiff mashThe hinge of the dish: potatoes mashed with milk or cream will slump in the fat and shed their coating. Use baking potatoes, dry them in the pan over low heat after mashing, and bind with an egg yolk if the mixture will not hold a ball. Chilled leftover mash works better than fresh.
- "Cover them with an egg"This means the standard two-stage coating — roll in beaten whole egg, then in fine dry breadcrumbs. A preliminary dusting of flour, not mentioned here, makes the egg cling far more reliably.
- Bread-crumbsIn household books of this period bread-crumbs generally meant grated or sieved crumbs from stale bread, and dry crumbs suit this coating better than fresh soft ones. Panko gives a coarser crust than the original probably intends but fries well.
- Lard and its temperatureLard is still sold and gives the cleanest flavour here; any neutral fat with a high smoke point substitutes. Two minutes only makes sense at roughly 360–375F, deep enough that the balls float free. Cooler fat and the crumbs soak; hotter and they colour before the centre warms.
- Everything inside is already cookedFrying only crisps the shell and heats the middle. That is why the time is so short — there is nothing to cook through, so pull them the moment they are evenly golden brown.
- The tongue, ham and onionMinced cooked tongue or ham should be chopped fine and worked in before shaping; keep it a modest proportion of the mixture or the balls lose cohesion. Raw chopped onion will not soften in two minutes; sweat it first.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, a pound of mashed potato will make somewhere near eighteen walnut-sized balls, enough for about four as a side. Drain on paper, salt while hot, and serve promptly -- they go leathery as they cool.
Rissole comes into English from French, where it described a small round or oval item enclosed in a crust and fried; the older sense of a pastry-wrapped mince survives alongside the plain crumbed ball seen here. This version belongs squarely to the thrift economy of Buckeye Cookery: cold mashed potato, a scrap of yesterday's tongue or ham, a slice of stale bread reduced to crumbs, and a spoonful of lard. It is a conversion of leftovers into a dish worth putting on the table, which is why the instructions assume you already have the mash and the cooked meat on hand rather than telling you to make either.