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Rissoles, Sweet
Roll and stamp the pastry in small rounds, as for ordinary rissoles. Lay in the centre a spoonful of jam or marmalade, put a round of pastry on the top, and press the edges securely. Brush the rissoles over with egg, lay a little ring of pastry on the top of each, brush over with egg again, and bake on a baking-tin in a well-heated oven. When the pastry is set, take the rissoles out, sift finely-powdered sugar over them, and return them to the oven for a few minutes. Serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each. Sufficient, a dozen for a dish.
A jam turnover in disguise: two stamped rounds of pastry sealed around a spoonful of preserve, glazed twice and finished with a sugar crust. The hinge is the seal — a gap lets the jam boil out and weld the pastry to the tin.
- "Well-heated oven"Read as a brisk oven, roughly 400-425F in modern terms, though the book gives no figure. The pastry needs to set fast so the edges lock before the jam liquefies. Twenty minutes suits small rounds, but the recipe does not specify how large to stamp them.
- Which pastryCassell's assumes you already have a paste on hand and does not say which. Puff or rough puff gives the lift that makes the little pastry ring on top worth doing; shortcrust works but stays flat and is more prone to leaking.
- Sealing the edgesDamp the rim of the lower round with water or egg before capping it, then press with a fork or the back of a smaller cutter. Egg wash alone on a dry edge is not a reliable glue.
- Don't overfillA rounded teaspoon per rissole, kept well inside the border. Jam expands and thins considerably at oven heat, and a heaped spoonful will find any weakness in the seam.
- The two-stage finishThe second trip to the oven is not an afterthought — it melts the sifted icing sugar into a thin glaze rather than leaving raw powder that will dissolve in the steam. Two or three minutes is enough; watch it, as sugar over a hot egg wash colours quickly.
- Baking sheetLine it. Any jam that escapes turns to hard caramel on a bare tin. A rim on the tray helps too.
- Yield and servingThe recipe reckons a dozen to a dish. The folded napkin was a common Victorian presentation for fried and dry-baked items; it absorbed steam and kept the underside from going soft. A wire rack does the same job.
- Cost note"1d. each" is a penny in pre-decimal currency, a period pricing convention Cassell's applies throughout rather than a measurement.
Rissole came into English from French, where it meant a small ball or roll of forcemeat, usually fried in fat and descended from Old French forms built on a Latin root meaning reddish or browned — the same root that lies behind roux. By the nineteenth century English cookery had widened the word to cover almost any small enclosed parcel of pastry, savoury or sweet, and Cassell's treats the sweet version simply as the ordinary rissole with jam swapped in for the meat filling. That kind of cross-reference is characteristic of the book: it assumes you have read the savoury entry, have paste already made, and need only be told what changes. The cost is quoted per piece, a convention applied throughout the book.