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Kidney, Rissoles Of
Take the remains of an ox kidney; cut some thin slices from it, weigh them, and to half a pound of kidney put half a pound of lean boiled ham. Mince the meat very finely, season with pepper and salt, and moisten it with the yolk of an egg well beaten. Roll out half a pound of the trimmings of puff paste to the thickness of an eighth of an inch. Divide the mince into small balls, roll each one in paste, and fry them in hot fat till they are brightly browned. Serve as hot as possible, and garnish with parsley. Time, three or four minutes to fry. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian way of using up cold cooked kidney and pastry scraps. The essential point is that the filling is already cooked before it goes into the pastry.
- Start with cooked kidney"The remains of an ox kidney" means leftovers from a stewed or braised dish, not raw offal. Three or four minutes of frying is enough to brown the pastry but nowhere near enough to cook raw kidney through, so use kidney that has already been slowly cooked until tender.
- Ox kidneyBeef kidney, sold as ox kidney at a butcher and rarely at supermarkets. It is strongly flavoured; soaking in salted water or milk before its initial cooking tames it. Lamb's kidney, cooked and cooled, behaves the same way here.
- QuantitiesEqual weights of kidney and lean boiled ham, 8 oz each, bound with one egg yolk. The ham carries most of the salt, so season the mince lightly and taste before adding more.
- Puff paste trimmings8 oz of scraps left from another pastry job. Ready-rolled all-butter puff pastry works; re-rolled trimmings puff unevenly. Roll to about 3 mm.
- Sealing the ballsThe hinge of the dish. Wrap each ball so there is no open seam and press the joins firmly, brushing with water or egg if needed. A split parcel dumps the mince into the fat and the rissole collapses.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat"; for deep fat, somewhere around 350-360F is a reasonable modern reading. Hotter and the pastry colours before the layers set; cooler and the parcels absorb fat. Three to four minutes gives "brightly browned" pastry and a hot centre.
- ServingFour or five as a savoury course, or two or three as a main with a green salad. They go soft and greasy as they cool, so fry in batches and serve straight from the pan.
Rissoles in nineteenth-century British cookery were a made dish of minced cooked meat, either enclosed in pastry or crumbed, and fried, and they existed chiefly to make yesterday's joint appear as today's dinner. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton before it, devotes long runs of entries to "the remains of" a roast or a stew, since a large household bought meat in large pieces and waste was a moral as well as a financial failing. Ox kidney was cheap, sold with or near the beef, and turns up constantly in steak and kidney puddings and stewed kidney; its leftovers, being strong-tasted, are here cut with something milder, boiled ham. The listed cost of 1s. 6d. for four or five people marks this as an economical dish, and the use of pastry trimmings rather than fresh paste is the same thrift applied twice over.