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Turkey Rissoles
Take the remains of cold cooked turkey. Cut off the meat, free it from skin and sinew, and weigh it. Mince finely, and with a pound of turkey put a quarter of a pound of grated tongue or lean ham, and a quarter of a pound of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Add two ounces of clarified butter or two ounces of fat bacon finely minced, a boiled onion chopped small, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, and bind them together with the yolk of an egg. Roll out some puffpaste very thin, stamp it out in rounds, and lay a spoonful of meat on each round. Moisten the edges of the pastry, and draw them together at the top of the meat to form a ball. Dip these in beaten egg, and fry in hot fat till they are brightly browned. Drain on a sieve before the fire for a few minutes to free them from fat, and serve piled on a neatly-folded napkin. Time, five or six minutes to fry the rissoles. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the cold turkey. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian way of finishing the Christmas turkey: minced meat enclosed in puff paste and deep-fried. It works, but the pastry is the part that goes wrong.
- Seal the pastry properlyThe hinge of the dish is the join at the top of the ball. Any gap and hot fat drives into the filling, the ball bursts and the pastry unravels. Moisten the edges with water or egg wash, pinch firmly, and chill the finished rissoles for 20-30 minutes before they go into the fat.
- Fat temperature"hot fat" here probably means somewhere around 350-360F. The filling is already cooked, so the five or six minutes given is for browning the paste through; too cool and the puff paste absorbs fat and stays pale, too hot and it colours before the layers set.
- Puff paste, thinRolled "very thin" means about 2-3mm. Shop-bought all-butter puff, rolled a little thinner than it comes, is the practical substitute. Stamp rounds of roughly 3 inches for a spoonful of filling.
- Grated tongue or lean hamPressed ox tongue is a specialist purchase now; good cooked ham, prosciutto cotto or a little finely chopped bacon gives the same salty backbone. Grating cold tongue is easier than it sounds because it is firm and dense.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces of clarified butter is about 4 tablespoons. Its job is to keep the mince from drying out during frying, so do not leave it out; melted butter with the milk solids skimmed off is fine.
- A boiled onionBoiling the onion first takes out the raw bite, which matters because the filling gets so little cooking. Simmer a small onion 10 minutes and chop it fine, or sweat it in a little of the butter.
- BindingOne yolk to close on two pounds of mixture is a light bind. If the mince is dry, add a spoonful of turkey gravy or stock rather than a second yolk, which makes the filling rubbery.
- Draining and servingThe sieve before the fire means a rack in a warm place; a rack in a 250F oven for five minutes does the same. Ignore the folded napkin unless you want the period effect. The recipe says the batch is enough for five or six, which suits it as a light dish with a green salad or a sharp fruit relish.
- CostThe shilling quoted is for everything but the bird, and that is the point of the note: the dish costs almost nothing because the turkey is already paid for.
Rissole comes into English from French, where it descends ultimately to the old sense of something reddened or browned by frying, and by the nineteenth century it covered almost any small fried ball or cake of minced meat. It belongs to the great body of recipes for cold meat, which is where a great deal of Victorian middle-class cookery actually lived: a household that had roasted a large bird was expected to keep producing meals from it for days. The pastry-wrapped version given here is the older, more formal treatment, closer to a small fried pie than to the breadcrumbed rissole, and the addition of tongue or ham is doing exactly what it looks like: putting savour and salt back into meat that lost both when it was first roasted and then went cold.