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Roll, Forced
Take a rasped French roll, cut a lid off one end, and scoop out the crumb. Make a ragout or hash of pigeon, veal, beef, or sweetbreads, or anything else at hand; fill the roll with it while warm; put on the top; fasten it with a little white of egg; dip the roll in milk, and fry in plenty of hot lard or butter.
A hollowed bread roll filled with hot ragout and shallow-fried — Victorian cookery's answer to the leftover problem. Two things decide whether it works: the filling must be thick, and the bread must be sealed.
- "Rasped"To rasp a roll is to scrape the browned outer crust away with a grater or rasp, leaving a pale, slightly porous surface. Period sources give the practice for appearance and to remove a gritty or over-baked crust; whether it also helps the roll take the milk and fat more evenly is a reasonable guess rather than a stated reason. A microplane or the coarse side of a box grater does it in seconds.
- The rollA period "French roll" is a small crusty bread roll, usually made with a little milk and butter — closer to a modern soft dinner roll or petit pain than to a baguette section; the recipe specifies no size. Choose one firm enough to hold its shape when hollowed; a soft supermarket bun collapses in the fat.
- Filling temperature"Fill the roll with it while warm" is doing real work. The ragout is fully cooked before it goes in, and the frying only crisps the outside — the bread would burn long before a cold filling reached temperature. Have the hash hot off the stove and fry immediately.
- Make the ragout thickAnything loose or gravy-heavy soaks through the crumb walls and bursts the roll in the pan. Reduce the sauce until it mounds on a spoon, or bind it with a little roux, before filling.
- SweetbreadsCalf or lamb sweetbreads need soaking, blanching, peeling of the membrane and pressing before they are cut up for a hash — the book assumes you have done all that elsewhere. Cooked chicken, braised beef or minced veal in a reduced sauce stands in without ceremony.
- Sealing the lidEgg white is the glue, and it needs a moment to set. Brush the cut edges, press the lid on, and let the roll sit a minute before the milk dip so the seal takes.
- The milk dipA quick dunk only — in and out. A soaked roll goes soggy inside and spits violently in the fat.
- FryingFry in lard, clarified butter or a neutral oil, hot but not smoking, turning to colour all sides; only the outside needs crisping, so a few minutes is enough. The recipe calls for "plenty" of fat, so expect something between shallow- and deep-frying. Whole butter browns and burns quickly at frying heat; clarify it or use lard as written. Drain on paper before serving.
- YieldOne roll per person as a savoury course or light supper dish, with a spoonful of the same ragout or a sharp sauce alongside. Serve at once — they soften within minutes.
"Forced" here is the old kitchen sense of the word: stuffed, English "force" being an alteration of "farce", from the French farcir, the same root that gives us forcemeat. Filling a hollowed loaf and frying or baking it was standard practice in English cookery from at least the eighteenth century, and this is a method more than a dish — the instruction "or anything else at hand" is the point of the entry. A Victorian kitchen is generally said to have produced small quantities of cooked meat constantly, from joints, birds and offal, in households where throwing food away was not readily contemplated; recipes like this one existed to give a scrap of yesterday's pigeon the dignity of a hot course. The rasped roll also tells you something about period bread, which came from a baker's oven with a thick, often ashy crust that cooks are often said to have scraped off before using it at table.