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Rissoles, Savoury
Mince very finely any white meat remaining from cooked poultry, and mix with it a fourth of its weight in ham or tongue. Season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and add a fourth part of grated bread-crumbs. Bind the mince together with beaten egg. Instead of pastry, make a forcemeat as follows. With four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs mix a quarter of an ounce of minced lemon-rind, a quarter of an ounce of powdered savoury herbs, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. With the fingers work into the bread two ounces of sweet butter, and the unbeaten yolk of an egg. The forcemeat ought to be sufficiently firm to roll out on a floured board to the thickness of the third of an inch. Roll out the forcemeat, stamp it into rounds, lay upon one of these a small ball of minced chicken, put another forcemeat round upon it, and repeat until the meat is used. Close the edges securely, dip the rissoles in egg and bread-crumbs, and fry in hot fat till they are lightly browned. Drain them from the fat, and serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Time to fry, five or six minutes.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast chicken or turkey, with a bread-and-butter forcemeat standing in for pastry. The forcemeat is the whole difficulty: get its consistency right and the rest is straightforward.
- The hinge: forcemeat textureThe crumb, butter and yolk paste must hold together firmly enough to roll to a third of an inch without cracking or sticking. Use fine dry crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and if the mixture will not cohere add a little more yolk or a teaspoon of cold water, sparingly.
- Proportions in plain termsFour ounces of crumbs is roughly a cup of fine dry breadcrumbs; two ounces of butter is half a stick. A quarter ounce of minced lemon rind is about the zest of one lemon, and a quarter ounce of the recipe's powdered herbs is somewhere in the region of one to two tablespoons, depending how finely they are ground.
- "Sweet butter"This means unsalted butter, not sweetened. Salted butter works, but reduce the added salt.
- Sealing and fryingPress and pinch the edges firmly, then chill the assembled rissoles for 20 minutes before the egg-and-crumb coating. Cold rissoles hold their shape; warm ones split and leak into the fat.
- Fat temperatureDeep fry at 350–365F. The filling is already cooked, so five or six minutes is only for heating through and colouring; hotter fat browns the crumb before the centre warms.
- The napkinServing fried food on a folded linen napkin was standard Victorian practice to absorb fat. A rack over a tray does the job better and keeps the crust crisp.
Rissoles came into English cookery from French rissole, a small fried parcel of chopped meat, and by the late nineteenth century the word covered almost any minced-and-fried remnant of a joint. The version demonstrates a point of technique rather than a set dish: the ordinary rissole is wrapped in pastry, and here a rich breadcrumb forcemeat is substituted to show that the casing need not be flour and fat. That thrift is the real subject. A household that roasted a large bird on Sunday expected to see it again as mince. Ham or tongue in the mixture is often said to be a Victorian trick for giving cold poultry back some savour and colour.