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Rissoles, Pork
Take the remains of boiled leg of pork, free it from all gristle, and put the pieces through a mincing machine, then pound it in a mortar with a little salt, some crushed peppercorns, and an ounce of bread-crumbs; bind with an egg, and make into balls, flour, and fry them in hot fat until brown. Arrange them on a hot dish, and serve with fried potatoes.
A leftovers dish that depends almost entirely on how finely the pork is worked and how firmly it is bound. A food processor does in seconds what the mincer and mortar did in two stages.
- The hinge: bind it properlyThe recipe gives no weight of pork, but one egg and only an ounce (about 1/4 cup) of breadcrumbs to a pound or so of mince is a lean bind, and the balls will break up in the fat if the mixture is loose. Work it until it is tacky and holds its shape when squeezed, and chill the shaped balls for 20 minutes before flouring.
- Mincer and mortarPulse the trimmed pork in a food processor to a coarse mince, then keep pulsing with the seasoning and crumbs until it takes on a paste-like texture. The pounding stage was there to make the meat cohesive, not merely fine, so do not stop at the mince.
- An ounce of breadcrumbsAbout 1/4 cup of dry crumbs, or a generous 1/2 cup of fresh. Use fresh soft crumbs if the pork is dry; dry crumbs if it was fatty.
- Crushed peppercornsCoarsely cracked black pepper, not a fine grind, and the coarseness is part of the point in a pale, mild forcemeat. Start with a scant teaspoon per pound and taste the raw mixture only by frying a teaspoonful as a tester.
- FryingDeep or shallow fry at 350-360F. The pork is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust and heating through: three to four minutes for balls the size of a walnut.
- Boiled leg of porkAny cooked, unsmoked pork works, though a boiled or braised joint is best because it stays moist. Cured ham or gammon will make the mixture too salty for the added salt called for here.
- Yield and servingA pound of cooked pork gives about 16 walnut-sized rissoles, enough for four. Fried potatoes are the book's suggestion; a sharp apple sauce or mustard cuts the richness.
Rissoles belong to the large family of Victorian and Edwardian re-made dishes, in which yesterday's joint was minced, seasoned, bound and fried rather than sent to the table cold a second time. The word comes into English from French, generally traced to an older form meaning something reddened or browned, and by the nineteenth century it covered everything from meat enclosed in pastry to plain fried forcemeat balls like these. The mortar in the instructions is worth noticing too, since the pounding step that gives the mixture its cohesion was the standard route to a smooth forcemeat before domestic machinery replaced it.