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Chicken Rissoles
1 cup cold cooked chicken 2 tablespoons minced mushrooms 1/2 cup White Sauce No. 2 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1/4 the rule for Puff Paste Mince the chicken very fine, combine with mushrooms, seasonings and sauce; let it cook one minute and set away to cool. Roll puff paste one-eighth inch thick and cut twelve four-inch rounds; divide the chicken paste into twelve parts and put one on each round of paste a little to one side of the center, flatten it slightly, wet the rim of paste a little way from the edge with white of egg; add another egg to the one from which you used and beat with 1 tablespoon of milk. Dip the rissoles in this, taking care not to handle the edges nor separate the cover. Drain them and cook in hot fat till a golden brown. The fat should be hotter than for doughnuts, but not so hot as for croquettes. Dry on paper and serve at once. This gives two for each of the six persons at lunch, but in a course dinner one is quite enough for each person. Aspic Jelly No 1. 5 cups strong consomme 1 box gelatine 1 tablespoon carrot (minced) 1 tablespoon onion (minced) Dash of cayenne 1/2 cup wine 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 teaspoons vinegar or lemon juice Whites and shells of 2 eggs Cook consomme, vegetables, lemon juice and one-half the wine for ten minutes. Soak the gelatine in 1 cup of cold water, let stand for twenty minutes. Pour the hot broth over the soaked gelatine, add the remainder of wine to the egg, beat slightly and add to the broth. Stir well together, remove from the fire and let stand for thirty minutes. Strain through flannel or two thicknesses of cheese-cloth. In hot weather reduce liquid 1 cup.
Aspic Jelly No. 2 (Without Meat) 4 cups cold water 1 cup sherry wine 2 tablespoons each malt, tarragon and chili vinegar Rind of half a lemon Whites and shells of 2 eggs 10 peppercorns Carrot (1 tablespoon minced fine) Turnip (1 tablespoon minced fine) Onion (1 tablespoon minced fine) 1 stalk celery 1 teaspoon salt 2 sprigs parsley 1 box gelatine Put all the ingredients, except the gelatine and egg, into a stew pan. Put over the fire until it boils. Soak the gelatine in 1 cup of cold water for twenty minutes. Pour the boiling broth over the soaked gelatine and beat slightly. Heat the broth a few minutes after adding the egg; remove from the fire, let stand for thirty minutes, filter through flannel or napkin.
Two separate items ran together on this page: fried chicken turnovers, and two aspic jellies that would have been used to glaze or garnish cold entrées. The rissoles are straightforward once the missing cross-references are filled in.
- White Sauce No. 2A cross-reference not printed on this page; the usual reading is a medium white sauce, roughly equal butter and flour to a cup of milk, cooked until thick and smooth. You need only half a cup, and it should be stiff enough to bind the minced chicken rather than run out of the pastry.
- "1/4 the rule for Puff Paste"A quarter of the book's puff paste batch; the batch size is not stated on this page, but the quarter must be enough for twelve four-inch rounds rolled an eighth of an inch thick. All-butter frozen puff pastry, rolled to an eighth of an inch, does the same job.
- The frying temperatureThis is the hinge. The book gives no degrees, only "hotter than for doughnuts, but not so hot as for croquettes," which points to the upper end of ordinary frying heat, somewhere in the region of 375-385F: hot enough to set the pastry and puff it before the seam softens, not so hot that the outside colors before the layers separate. Too cool and the pastry absorbs fat and the filling leaks.
- The garbled egg passageRead it as two steps. Brush the border of each round with plain egg white and seal; then make a dip by beating a whole egg into the leftover white with a tablespoon of milk, and dip the sealed rissoles in that before frying. Press the edges from the flat, not the rim, so the seal holds.
- Chill before fryingThe filling is cooked a minute and cooled for a reason — warm filling melts the butter layers. Once assembled, refrigerate the rissoles 20 minutes; cold pastry into hot fat is what makes them rise.
- "1 box gelatine"A period box is usually reckoned at about 1 oz, roughly four modern 1/4-oz envelopes. Against the six-odd cups of liquid each of these recipes totals, that gives a firm, sliceable aspic, which is what a molded or coated entree needs; it will be noticeably stiffer than a modern dessert jelly.
- Clarifying and strainingEgg white and crushed shell form the raft that carries off the cloud, and the jelly is better left undisturbed than boiled hard; note, though, that both recipes here add the egg to broth already hot or boiling rather than cold. A dampened jelly bag, doubled cheesecloth or a coffee filter replaces the flannel.
- Chili vinegar and malt vinegarChili vinegar was vinegar steeped with hot peppers and is now a specialty item; a splash of cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne stands in. Malt vinegar is still sold and is worth using as written for its maltiness.
- YieldTwelve rissoles, two apiece for six at luncheon, as the text says. Serve straight from the fat; reheated puff pastry with a wet filling never recovers.
Rissole comes into English from French, where the word is generally traced to a Latin root meaning reddish — a reference to the browned crust rather than to any particular filling. By the late nineteenth century American cookbooks used it loosely for anything savory sealed in pastry and fried, and it turned a cup of leftover roast chicken into a course fit for a dinner party. The aspics that follow belong to the same style of service. Cold molded and glazed dishes were a mark of a competent household kitchen in this period, when gelatine had recently become cheap and reliable in boxed form, and a clear jelly — strained through flannel, tinted only by consommé or sherry — was a piece of visible skill.