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Fowl, Rissoles Of
Take half a pound of the remains of a cold fowl, without skin or bone, and grate an ounce or two of tongue or ham, then chop all together until the meat is quite smooth. Boil down the bones and trimmings with water to cover, a bit of lemon-peel, a piece of a laurel-leaf, and a bit of garlic the size of a peppercorn. Boil until the liquid is reduced to about a quarter of a pint, which should be strained and used, at least as much as may be required of it, to moisten the meat. Mix with the chopped fowl a couple of tea-spoonfuls of browned flour, and season it with white pepper, salt, and nutmeg; add a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and some of the gravy. When wanted to make into balls (it should first be allowed to stand two or three hours to get firm), have ready beaten egg and finely-grated bread-crumbs; roll the balls twice into the egg and crumbs that they may be thickly coated, and fry in plenty of boiling lard. Turn them about to get done on all sides alike of a light brown. Serve with a bouquet of fried parsley in the centre of the dish, and the rissoles round it. Time, eight minutes to fry. Sufficient for six balls.
A Victorian way of using up the carcass of a roast bird: the meat becomes the croquette, the bones become the binder. The whole thing hinges on the reduction being strong enough to set the mixture, and on the mixture being properly cold before it is shaped.
- The hinge: moisten sparinglyAdd the reduced stock a spoonful at a time until the meat just holds together when pressed. A wet mixture will burst its coating in the fat, and no amount of chilling will rescue it.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of picked cooked meat is about 225 g, or the yield of one leg and one breast of a medium chicken. A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, roughly 2/3 cup; you will need only a few tablespoons of it.
- Laurel-leafThis means bay, Laurus nobilis — one dried bay leaf, or half a fresh one. It is not the ornamental cherry laurel of hedges, whose leaves are not a food.
- Garlic "the size of a peppercorn"A deliberately tiny amount: think a sliver, well under a quarter of a clove. The point of the instruction is restraint rather than precise measurement.
- Browned flourPlain flour toasted dry in a pan or oven until nut-coloured. It thickens less than raw flour but adds colour and a roasted note; two teaspoons of ordinary flour will bind rather more strongly, so keep the gravy back accordingly.
- Chilling is not optionalThe two or three hours' standing is what makes the balls shapeable. The refrigerator does the job in an hour; the mixture should be firm and cold to the touch when you roll it.
- Double coatingEgg, crumbs, egg, crumbs again, with a moment's rest between coats so the first layer sets. This double jacket is what keeps a loose forcemeat intact in hot fat.
- Frying"Boiling lard" means fat at frying heat, in modern terms somewhere around 350–375F, deep enough for the balls to float. Eight minutes suits balls of the size implied here; the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- YieldSix balls; the recipe gives no number of eaters, so treat any portion count as an estimate. Fried parsley means small dry sprigs dropped into the same fat for a few seconds until crisp and still green.
Rissoles belong to the great Victorian genre of second-day cookery, where a joint or bird was expected to reappear in another guise rather than be thrown out. The name is generally traced through French, from an earlier roissole, to a reconstructed Latin form meaning reddish — apparently a reference to the browned crust. What is notable in this version is the insistence on boiling down the bones and trimmings for a concentrated gravy, the same principle as a reduced meat glaze applied to half a pound of leftovers. Tongue or ham grated into the mixture was a common nineteenth-century way of giving reheated poultry back some savour.