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RISSOLES (Careme's recipe)
Take three-quarters of a pound of brioche paste. Roll it out very thin, and place upon it--about two inches from the edge and one inch from each other--small balls of any savoury mince about the size of a nutmeg. Brush the pasty round the mince with beaten egg, fold it over the meat. Press it round each ball, stamp out the rissoles with a pastry-cutter two inches in diameter, taking care to keep the mince-meat ball exactly in the centre of each one. Lay the rissoles on a hot plate for two or three minutes to make them rise, and fry in butter or lard, not too hot, till they are brown. They will become quite round. Drain them from the fat, and serve very hot.
A rissole in the French sense: cooked mince enclosed in pastry and fried, here using enriched brioche dough rather than the puff or short paste more common in English kitchens. The hinge is temperature — the fat must stay moderate so the dough proves and cooks through before the outside colours.
- Brioche pasteThree-quarters of a pound is roughly 340 g of made dough, enough for perhaps a dozen and a half two-inch rissoles depending how thin it is rolled. Use it well chilled; warm brioche is too slack to roll thin or to stamp cleanly.
- "Any savoury mince"This assumes a larder of cooked meat — yesterday's roast, game, poultry, or a salpicon bound with thick reduced sauce. The filling must be fully cooked and cool before it goes in, and stiff enough to hold a ball; a wet mince will burst the dough in the fat.
- Size of a nutmegAbout three-quarters of an inch across, roughly a teaspoon. Any larger and the two-inch cutter will not seal a proper border around it.
- SealingPress the air out around each ball with your fingertips before stamping, not after. Trapped air expands in the fat and splits the seam.
- "Lay on a hot plate for two or three minutes to make them rise"This reads as a short prove rather than a cooking step; a merely warm surface is probably what is intended, since a genuinely hot plate would begin to cook the base and melt out the butter.
- Frying temperature"Not too hot" points to a moderate heat, in modern terms somewhere around 325-340F (165-170C). Brioche browns fast because of its sugar and egg, and hotter fat will give a dark crust over raw dough. They turn as they swell, which is why the recipe says they become quite round.
- FatButter alone is liable to burn at any depth. Clarified butter, lard, or a neutral oil with a little clarified butter for flavour behaves better.
- ServingDrain on paper and serve at once, piled on a napkin with fried parsley, as a hot entrée or savoury. They collapse and go leathery if held.
Antonin Carême (1784–1833) was the defining figure of early nineteenth-century French grande cuisine, cook to Talleyrand, the Prince Regent and the Rothschilds, and the author of the multi-volume works from which Victorian English compilers borrowed freely — Cassell's among them, which reprints attributed "recipes" of his throughout as marks of authority. The rissole itself long predates him: the word descends through Old French from a Latin root meaning reddened or browned, and medieval English cookery books already give rissheowes of minced meat fried in paste. Here the plain crust gives way to brioche paste, so that the parcels puff and turn spherical in the fat. The dish also belongs to a working logic of the large nineteenth-century kitchen, where cooked meat from the previous day's service was reworked into small hot entrées rather than thrown away.