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Chicken Rissoles
Pick the flesh from a cold chicken, mince it finely, and to every quarter of a pound of meat put one ounce of lean ham, one ounce of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a small onion, boiled and chopped, a piece of clarified butter about the size of a walnut, half a salt-spoonful of salt, half that quantity of pepper, and two or three grates of a nutmeg. Mix these thoroughly, then moisten the mixture with a little stiff white sauce. If this is not at hand, it may easily be made by boiling the trimmings of the chicken with suitable seasonings and a little gelatine. Let the mixture get cold, and form it into balls. Make some good pastry, and roll it out thinly. Cover the balls with it, and fry them in hot fat till they are a light brown, drain them thoroughly from the fat, and serve them piled high on a napkin, with fried parsley garnishing the dish. Time to fry, ten minutes, Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold chicken. Allow two for each person.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast chicken: seasoned mince bound with a stiff sauce, wrapped in thin pastry, and deep-fried. The binding is the part that decides whether it works.
- The hinge is a very stiff binderThe white sauce must be thick enough to hold its shape when cold — closer to a paste than a pouring sauce. A loose filling will burst the pastry in the fat. Chill the mixture properly before shaping, at least an hour in the refrigerator.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of chicken is about 4 oz (115 g) picked meat, roughly three-quarters of a cup to a cup packed. A salt-spoon is usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning works out to an eighth teaspoon salt and a pinch of pepper per batch — taste and adjust, as the ham carries salt of its own.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout half an ounce to an ounce, a tablespoon or so; the measure was never standardised. Clarified butter keeps better than fresh butter; ordinary butter is fine here since the mixture is cooked immediately.
- Pastry, not breadcrumbsThese are enclosed in thin pastry — the recipe specifies only 'good pastry' — rather than egg-and-crumbed, which makes them closer to a small fried turnover. Seal the edges with a little water or egg wash and press out air pockets, or the pastry will split.
- FryingTen minutes is longer than these need in fat kept properly hot; at a steady 350–360F (175–180C) the pastry should colour in appreciably less. The filling is already cooked, so you are only crisping the crust — colour is your guide.
- The gelatine trickBoiling the carcass trimmings with a little gelatine gives a stock that sets firm when cold, which is the Victorian shortcut to a stiff binder. A well-reduced homemade chicken stock chilled to a jelly does the same thing without added gelatine.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly and give them a few seconds in the hot fat only; wet parsley spits violently and limp parsley is unpleasant.
- YieldA quarter pound of chicken plus the additions makes six to eight small balls. At two per person, the recipe as written serves three or four; scale up by the quarter-pound unit.
Rissoles belong to the great Victorian category of rìhauffé cookery — dishes built entirely around yesterday's joint. The word descends from Old French roissole or rissole, from a Vulgar Latin root meaning reddish, a root it shares with the verb rissoler, to brown; in nineteenth-century English kitchens it covered both crumbed croquette-style balls and, as here, small pastry-wrapped parcels fried in deep fat. A recipe of the period could give a probable cost of sixpence "exclusive of the cold chicken" precisely because the chicken was assumed to be a sunk cost, already paid for at an earlier meal; the whole point of the dish was to turn a picked-over bird into something that could be sent to table piled on a folded napkin and garnished, looking deliberate rather than thrifty. The folded napkin under fried food was standard practice of the period, meant to absorb the last of the frying fat.