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Meat Rissoles, German
Fry two or three ounces of bacon cut into small squares, and then add the following ingredients. To a well-beaten egg, stir a quarter of a pound of finely-minced cold meat, a quarter of a pound of soaked bread (squeezed dry), a table-spoonful of chopped onion, another of parsley, and pepper and salt to taste. When these ingredients are fried sufficiently, turn them out into a basin until nearly cold; then add a couple of eggs, beat all well together, form the mixture into balls about the size of an egg, and fry for six minutes, or drop them into boiling soup, stock, or water; pour rich gravy over them before serving. Time to make, half an hour. Sufficient for six balls. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of cold meat.
A Victorian way with leftover roast, closer to German Frikadellen than to the pastry-wrapped rissole an English cook of the same date would have expected. The method has two stages that the original runs together, so read it through before starting.
- Read the sequence twiceThe bacon and the first mixture (one egg, meat, bread, onion, parsley) are fried together as a loose hash, then cooled. Only afterwards do the remaining two eggs go in as the binder for shaping. Adding all three eggs at the start gives a batter that will not hold a ball.
- Cool it properly"Nearly cold" is the hinge. Beat eggs into a warm mixture and they scramble in the bowl, leaving the balls slack and grainy. Spread the fried mixture on a plate to speed it up.
- Soaked breadA quarter pound of bread, soaked in water or milk and wrung out hard between the hands; the recipe does not make clear whether the weight is taken before or after soaking. This is a panade; it keeps the balls tender. Bread a day or two old behaves better than fresh, which goes pasty.
- Cold meatA quarter pound of minced cooked meat, appreciably less than a packed cupful. Roast beef, veal, lamb or pork all work; the recipe assumes yesterday's joint. Mince it, do not blitz it to a puree.
- Frying timeSix minutes suits egg-sized balls fried in shallow hot fat, turned as they colour. The recipe gives no fat depth or temperature; if they are browning much faster than six minutes, the fat is too hot.
- Poaching in stockThe recipe says boiling soup, stock or water; a bare simmer is gentler, since hard agitation breaks the balls. No time is given for this method, so judge by the balls holding together and heating through.
- Yield and servingSix balls, so two as a main course with the gravy and potatoes, or three or four as a starter. If poached, the cooking stock makes the base of the "rich gravy" the recipe calls for.
- The cost noteEightpence exclusive of the cold meat is a pricing convention of the period, not information you can use. It tells you only that this was reckoned a cheap dish built on something already paid for.
Cassell's calls these German because they are: the mixture of minced cooked meat, soaked bread and egg, bound and fried into rounds, sits close to the German Frikadelle, though the related Klops is normally made from raw minced meat rather than cooked leftovers; the soaked-bread binder invites comparison with the one that carries a Semmelknödel. An English rissole of the same date usually meant something enclosed in pastry or crumbed and deep-fried, so the label here is doing real work, flagging a foreign method to a British cook. The instruction to drop the balls into soup rather than fry them points at the household logic behind the whole entry: a large joint was roasted, and the remains were expected to reappear for two or three more meals. Victorian cookery books devote long stretches to exactly this problem, and the costing in pence at the end of each recipe was standard throughout Cassell's.