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Rissoles and Patty Cases
Rissoles are very dainty entrees, considered elaborate enough for the most formal occasion. Cut puff paste in oblong pieces three by four inches, or stamp out in rounds. Place a spoonful of any savory meat mixture (creamed chicken, sweetbreads or mushrooms, daintily seasoned, being most suitable) on the lower half, fold over the wet edges of upper half and press well together. A sauce is served with them. A satisfactory proportion is two tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of flour, one cup of chicken or other stock. Study to season the mixtures and sauces in a way all your own, setting the seal of your own dainty individuality upon the dishes you prepare.
For patties, roll puff paste one-fourth inch thick, stamp out rounds with French cutter, remove centers from half the rounds, forming rings. Wet the edges of whole rounds, lay on the rings and press well together. Chill and bake twenty-five minutes. - See Page XVII.
A Pie Mold In the "old country" where pastry is more hygienic than in America, it would be looked upon as deadly to eat a pie with a soaked under crust. Either there is no under crust, simply a well baked top and a filling of anything from pigeons to fruit, or a pie mold is made. For this purpose, puff paste may be used, or what the Scotch call "half puff," a pastry we would class as rich, with about half as much butter as flour. This paste is put on the outside of a bowl of tin or graniteware, and pricked all over to keep it from puffing up in unseemly bubbles. A lil is fashioned from another round of pastry covering a saucer. It is ornamented with medallions and scalloped edged ribbons of paste, put on according to the cook's taste. It must be very carefully baked and turned frequently. When cold slip it off the mold and serve in any way desired. It may hold creamed meat, any stewed fruit or fresh fruit with powdered sugar sifted over it. - See Page XXI.
Two related preparations in one entry: filled puff-paste turnovers with a sauce, and hollow patty cases (what a French kitchen calls bouchées or vol-au-vent), plus a note on baking a free-standing pastry shell over an inverted bowl. The instructions assume you already know how to handle puff paste, so the gaps are worth filling.
- The hinge: everything must be coldPuff paste rises only if the butter layers are still solid when they hit the oven. Chill the assembled rissoles and patty rings at least 30 minutes before baking, and make sure the filling is cold and thick — a warm or loose filling melts the layers from the inside and the seams burst.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Puff paste needs a hot oven: 425–450F to force the steam and set the layers, dropping to about 375F for the last third of the baking so the interior dries out. The twenty-five minutes quoted for patty cases is plausible at that heat, though the book never states how large the rounds should be.
- "French cutter"A nested set of graduated round cutters, plain or fluted. Use one round for the base and a smaller one to cut the centre from the ring. Cut straight down without twisting; a twisted edge seals the layers together and the case rises lopsided.
- What "rissole" means hereBy the later nineteenth century a rissole often meant a croquette-style mixture breaded and fried; this entry uses the older, broader sense of a filled pastry turnover. Note that the entry never says how the rissoles themselves are to be cooked — only the patty cases are given a baking time.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour and one cup of stock is a standard medium velouté — roughly a cup of sauce, enough for four to six rissoles. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding stock so it doesn't taste of raw flour, and season it well; the book's advice about "your own dainty individuality" is really an instruction to salt properly and add lemon, sherry or nutmeg to taste.
- SweetbreadsNot a supermarket item now. They must be ordered from a butcher, soaked, blanched, trimmed of membrane and pressed before they go anywhere near a pastry filling. Creamed chicken or mushrooms are the easier substitutions the entry itself offers.
- "Half puff" and the pie moldHalf puff, as the entry defines it, is a paste with butter equal to about half the weight of the flour — close to what we would now call rough puff, though the older term describes the proportion rather than the method. Baked over an inverted metal bowl it needs to be pricked thoroughly, as stated; grease the bowl, and expect some shrinkage as the butter renders. "A lil is fashioned" is a typographical slip for "a lid."
- Yield and servingOblongs three by four inches folded over give substantial rissoles — figure one or two per person as a first course. Patty cases are best filled just before serving; a hot filling sitting in a baked case for more than a few minutes will soften the base.
Patty cases and rissoles belong to the Anglo-American reading of French service that dominated formal entertaining around 1900, when a menu was expected to include an entrée of small, sauced, individually portioned things between the fish and the roast. The hollow puff-paste case is generally traced, by tradition rather than documentation, to the early nineteenth-century Parisian kitchen, and the vol-au-vent and its smaller cousin the bouchée arrived in English-language cookbooks as markers of high-style cooking that an ambitious household could attempt at home. What makes this entry characteristic is the tone: the reader is told these are "elaborate enough for the most formal occasion" and then urged to season them with "your own dainty individuality" — the magazine's steady project of persuading middle-class women without a trained cook that they could produce restaurant work themselves. The digression on soggy under crusts and the superiority of "the old country" is a period commonplace; British cooks did favour pies with a top crust only, and the free-standing pastry mold baked over a bowl is a homely piece of improvisation.