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Rissoles, Potato
Boil the potatoes until floury; mash them, seasoning with salt and a little cayenne. Mince some parsley very fine, and work it up with the potatoes, adding a shallot, also minced fine. Bind with egg, roll into balls, and fry in fresh butter over a clear fire. Shredded meat may be added if desired.
A frugal Victorian way with leftover potato, closer to a croquette than to a true rissole. The whole thing hinges on the potatoes being dry.
- Floury means dryUse a mealy variety — Russet, King Edward, Maris Piper — and drain them thoroughly, returning them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute to steam off moisture. Waxy potatoes hold water and the balls will slump or burst in the fat.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. About 2 lb potatoes, 1 beaten egg, 2 tablespoons minced parsley and 1 shallot makes roughly 16 balls, enough for four as a side.
- Binding with eggAdd the egg to the mash once it has cooled to warm rather than hot, or it will scramble in streaks. If the mixture is too soft to roll, a tablespoon or two of flour firms it up; chilling for half an hour helps more.
- The shallotRaw minced shallot stays fairly sharp and crunchy inside a short fry. Sweating it in a little butter first gives a rounder flavour, though that is a matter of taste rather than anything the original asks for.
- "A clear fire"This means a fire burned down past smoking, giving steady, sootless heat — roughly medium to medium-high in modern terms. In a pan, butter alone browns and burns quickly at frying heat; half butter and half a neutral oil, or clarified butter, holds up better.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of fat, turning once, three to four minutes a side until the crust is set and brown. Do not crowd the pan; the balls need room or they steam and break apart.
- Shredded meatAny cooked meat, finely chopped rather than shredded, works; cold roast beef or mutton would have been the likeliest candidates. Keep it to no more than a third of the volume of the potato or the mixture loses its bind.
A rissole in the older English sense is a portion of savoury filling enclosed in pastry and fried, from the Old French roissole, ultimately from a Latin word for reddish, describing the browned crust. By the nineteenth century the term had loosened to cover almost anything minced, bound and fried, and it is used that way here, with mashed potato standing in for both the case and the filling. Recipes of this kind belong to the great Victorian literature of re-cooked leftovers, where a cold joint and yesterday's boiled potatoes were expected to reappear at the table in a form the family would not resent; the addition of parsley, shallot and cayenne is doing the work of disguise as much as of seasoning.