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Rissoles, Fish
Take the remains of cooked fish, freed from bone, pound it in a mortar with any sauce that was left over, add pepper and salt to taste and a breakfast-cupful of bread-crumbs. Bind with a beaten egg, then form into rissoles. Egg and bread-crumb them, and fry a golden brown. Serve garnished with parsley.
A leftovers recipe with no weights at all, which means the proportions are yours to judge. The single thing that decides success is the stiffness of the mixture before it is shaped.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 10 fl oz, so about 1¼ cups of crumbs. Add it gradually rather than all at once; the amount you need depends on how wet the fish and leftover sauce are.
- The hinge: a stiff, cold mixtureThe paste should hold a shape without slumping. If it is loose, more crumbs; if it is dry and crumbly, a spoonful of sauce. Chilling the shaped rissoles for 30 minutes before coating and frying makes them much less likely to break up in the fat.
- If there is no leftover sauceThe recipe asks only for 'any sauce that was left over', which in a fish course would often have been a white or parsley sauce. Failing that, use 3-4 tablespoons of thick bechamel, or mashed potato, to bind. Cream or milk alone is unlikely to give enough body.
- The mortarA food processor works, but in short pulses only. Fish pounded to a paste turns gluey and dense; you want the flakes broken down, not emulsified.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 350-375F, or a half-inch of oil in a heavy pan over medium-high heat. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust and heating the centre through, two to three minutes a side.
- Bones"Freed from bone" deserves attention with cooked white fish and especially with leftover salmon. Flake by hand and feel through it; pin bones survive pounding and are worse in a rissole than on a plate.
- SeasoningSeason the mixture and taste it before you add the raw egg. If the fish was smoked or salt-cured, hold back on the salt and lean on pepper, lemon and a little chopped parsley instead.
- YieldAbout a pound of picked cooked fish, with the crumbs and egg, makes roughly eight rissoles of a couple of ounces each, enough for three or four as a light main course with the parsley garnish and a sharp sauce.
Rissoles are the workhorse of the Victorian and Edwardian kitchen's second day: a way of turning Friday's boiled cod or Sunday's salmon into something that could be sent to table without apology. The word comes through French rissole, from an older form meaning reddened or browned, and in English cookery books it settles on almost anything minced, bound, coated and fried. The entry is really a method rather than a dish, offered without weights so that it fits whatever is in the larder. That absence of measurement is itself the period speaking: a household cook was expected to judge a binding by feel, and to regard the remains of a joint or a fish as a resource rather than a problem.