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Rissoles, Beef
Take one pound of cold cooked beef. Cut it into thin slices, remove the gristle, and chop the meat finely. Mix with it a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley, three table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a blade of mace finely pounded, and a little pepper and salt. Bind the whole together with a beaten egg. If it is not sufficiently moist with this, add a little meat gravy and a spoonful of ketchup. Roll out the trimmings of puff-paste to the thickness of a florin. Place small balls of mince, two inches from the edge and one inch distant from each other, moisten the pastry round the meat with water, and fold it over the balls. Stamp the rissoles out in rounds, and press the edges securely together. Dredge lightly with flour, and then fry in fat, not too hot, till they are browned. Drain them, and serve on a napkin garnished with parsley. Or, prepare the mince as above. Roll out the pastry, and stamp it in rounds two inches in diameter. Place a little ball of meat in the centre, moisten the edges of the pastry, draw it up over the meat, and pinch it securely. Or, stamp out an equal number of rounds. Place a little ball of meat upon one round, moisten the edges, and lay another round upon it. Press the edges of the pastry securely together, and flute them with the back of a knife. Time to fry, five or six minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian way of using up the Sunday joint: seasoned mince sealed in puff pastry trimmings and fried. Two things decide whether it works — a filling moist enough to hold together but not wet, and edges pressed tight enough that nothing leaks into the fat.
- Thickness of a florinA florin was a two-shilling silver coin, a little wider than a US quarter and thin: on the order of 1/16 inch. Roll the pastry to about 2 mm; much thicker and the pastry risks still being raw inside when the outside has browned.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons. Table-spoonfuls here are British, close enough to the modern 15 ml spoon.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried lacy aril from nutmeg. If you cannot get whole blades, use a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace, or grate a little nutmeg — the two are closely related in flavour, with mace generally the more delicate.
- KetchupIn a Victorian British kitchen this most likely means mushroom or walnut ketchup: thin, dark, salty, closer to Worcestershire sauce than to anything tomato. A teaspoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire gives the intended savoury lift; tomato ketchup adds sugar the recipe does not want.
- Frying temperature"Not too hot" is the instruction that matters, though the book gives no number. Moderate deep-frying heat, around 340-350F, suits the five or six minutes specified; fat much hotter will colour the pastry before it has cooked through.
- SealingWet only a narrow band of pastry, press out any trapped air as you fold, and crimp firmly. A rissole that opens in the pan will empty its filling and foam the fat.
- MoistureThe egg alone often leaves the mince crumbly. Add gravy a spoonful at a time until it just coheres when squeezed — a wet filling steams and bursts the pastry.
- Yield and servingOne pound of cooked beef makes roughly 18-24 small rissoles, serving five or six as the book says. The napkin is there to absorb fat; a wire rack over paper does the same job.
"Rissole" comes into English from French, where the noun is the older form — Old French roissole, ultimately from a Latin root for "reddish" — and the verb rissoler, to brown, derives from it. The word covered a wide family of small fried parcels long before it settled into the meaning of a fried mince cake. Cassell's places this among the leftover cookery that structured a Victorian middle-class week: a large joint roasted on Sunday reappeared as mince, hash, croquettes and rissoles for days afterward, and pastry trimmings saved from another dish were the natural wrapper. The costing — 1s. 6d. for five or six people — is part of the point, since these dictionaries were sold to households running on a fixed weekly allowance and expected to account for every scrap. Mace and mushroom ketchup often appear as seasonings for reheated beef in this period, both prized for adding depth to meat that had already given up much of its flavour to the first cooking.