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Potato Rissoles
Take two pounds of mashed potatoes, and mix with them two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley. Make them up into balls the size of a small apple, dip them in egg and bread-crumbs, and fry in plenty of hot fat till they are equally and brightly browned. Drain them on blotting-paper, and serve them piled high on a white serviette. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost of potatoes, 1d. or 1 1/2d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain fried potato ball from the era before the deep-fryer thermometer. The recipe is sound; only the drying, the fat temperature and the seasoning need translating.
- The hinge: dry, stiff mashTwo pounds of mashed potato will only hold a ball if it is dry and firm — floury potatoes, steamed off in the pan after draining, and no milk or cream. Wet mash absorbs fat, splits in the pan and turns the coating grey.
- Seasoning is assumed, not statedThis recipe, like many of its period, leaves salt and pepper unwritten. Season the mash properly before shaping; the crumb coating adds nothing but crunch, and an underseasoned rissole cannot be rescued afterwards.
- Egg and crumbsBeaten whole egg, loosened with a spoonful of water, and fine dry white crumbs. Chill the shaped balls for twenty or thirty minutes before coating and again before frying — they hold their shape far better.
- Fat temperature"Plenty of hot fat" means deep fat, in modern terms roughly 350-375F. The original's ten minutes probably allows for cooler, unregulated fat; at a modern frying temperature a small-apple-sized rissole browns in three to five minutes, and everything inside is already cooked.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper does the same job. Drain standing rather than lying flat if you can, so the underside does not steam soft.
- Serving on a servietteThe folded white napkin under fried food was a standard formal Victorian presentation, and would also take up residual grease. It is optional now; a warm dish and a hot oven for holding is more useful.
- YieldTwo pounds of mash makes roughly eight to twelve balls at the stated size of a small apple, consistent with the recipe's four or five people as a side dish or supper course.
- Cost noteThe pricing in pence per pound is a period reference point, not a shopping guide — Cassell's gave costs so a housekeeper could budget a menu.
Rissole comes into English from French, where it originally described a small fried item enclosed in pastry; by the nineteenth century British cookery had loosened the word to mean almost any seasoned mixture bound, coated and fried, most often as a way of using yesterday's meat or vegetables. This potato version belongs squarely to that thrift tradition -- it is a template rather than a set piece, and the same method carries chopped ham, fish or cold roast beef with equal ease. The costing in pence per pound is a reminder of the book's audience: a middle-class household running on a fixed weekly allowance, for whom a dish that turned leftover mash into something worth piling on a white napkin was a genuinely useful piece of information.