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VEAL RISSOLES (another way)
Take some cold veal, a little cold ham, some parsley, a small quantity of thyme, a little lemon-peel, and one anchovy; chop them all very small, and mix them with a few bread-crumbs, pepper, salt, mace, and nutmeg to taste. Wet the mixture with an egg, and form it into little balls or pyramids; dip these in egg, and roll them in bread-crumbs; fry them brown, and serve with a good beef gravy in the dish. Beef may be done in the same way.
A leftovers dish with no quantities at all, which is the point: the proportions are yours to judge. Two things govern the result — the mixture must be dry enough to hold, and the anchovy is seasoning rather than a flavour in its own right.
- Working proportionsFor about 12 rissoles use 12 oz cold cooked veal to 3 oz ham, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, a teaspoon of thyme leaves, the grated zest of half a lemon and one anchovy fillet. Bread-crumbs go in by the spoonful until the mass just coheres — start with 2 tablespoons and stop as soon as it holds a shape.
- The anchovyA single salt-packed or oil-packed fillet, mashed to a paste, is the whole of it. Rinse salt-packed anchovies first, and hold back on added salt until you have tasted the mixture, since ham and anchovy together carry most of the seasoning.
- Mace and nutmegBoth come from the same fruit and were standard in Victorian forcemeats. Use ground mace and freshly grated nutmeg sparingly — a scant quarter-teaspoon of mace and a few scrapes of nutmeg for the quantity above; more turns the mixture medicinal.
- Chop, do not process"Chop them all very small" means knife work or two turns of a mincer. A food processor reduces cold veal to paste and the rissoles come out dense and bouncy rather than tender.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of oil or clarified butter at 350–360F, three to four minutes, turning to brown all sides. Everything inside is already cooked, so the aim is a crisp crust and a hot centre; if the mixture went in cold from the refrigerator, allow the extra minute.
- PyramidsThe recipe offers the pyramid as an alternative to a plain ball, presumably as a presentational flourish. It also gives more crust per rissole, but the flat faces scorch faster than a ball — keep them moving in the pan.
- "A good beef gravy"In this period 'gravy' usually meant a meat-based stock or the juices of a joint rather than a heavily floured sauce. Pour it into the dish and set the rissoles on top so the crust stays crisp rather than sitting in liquid.
- Yield and servingThe quantities above make four servings as a light main course with a green salad or buttered greens, or eight as a first course. Fry shortly before serving; reheated rissoles lose the crust entirely.
A rissole is a fried, coated ball or cake of chopped cooked meat, from the Old French roissole, in turn from a Latin root meaning reddened — the browning is what names the dish. In Victorian and Edwardian cookery books rissoles belong to the large and unsentimental category of re-cooked meat: the joint roasted on Sunday, eaten cold early in the week and minced into rissoles or croquettes later, is the rhythm these books repeatedly describe, suited to households that bought meat in large pieces and had no refrigeration to spare. The anchovy here is characteristic of the period; cooks reached for anchovy, mushroom ketchup or a spoonful of Harvey's sauce to give reheated meat the savoury depth it had lost. Mace and nutmeg in a veal forcemeat are older still, a survival of the heavily spiced meat cookery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that lingered longest in exactly these made-over dishes. Cassell's, aimed at middle-class households running on one or two servants, prints several versions of the same idea — hence "another way" — and the closing note that beef will do as well makes the intent plain: the method mattered more than the meat.