Home › Fish › Fried Parsley (Clarified Butter to fry)
Fried Parsley (Clarified Butter to fry)
Clarified Butter to fry in.
Roll the pastry out very thin and stamp out some rounds with a fluted pastry cutter. Put a little heap of the mince on the centre of half of each round, wet the edges with a brush, and cover over with the other half; press gently, keeping the mince in the middle of each round. Dip these carefully in well-beaten egg, and crumb them in a mixture of breadcrumbs and chopped ham or truffles. Fry them in clarified butter, drain them, dish them up in a pyramid, and garnish with fried parsley. Hand Périgord sauce.
Galantine de Bœuf.
Ingredients.
One pound of Beef.
Half a pound of Bacon.
One gill of Stock.
Six ounces of Breadcrumbs.
This page is a fragment: the tail of a rissole recipe, its garnish, and the opening ingredient list of the next dish (Galantine de Bœuf) run together. What survives is workable if you supply your own pastry and mince quantities.
- What the text actually containsThere is no ingredient list for the rissoles themselves — only the method. Quantities have to be supplied by the cook: something on the order of 8 oz of puff or short pastry rolled very thin and a similar weight of well-seasoned mince, though the number of rounds and the yield depend entirely on the size of cutter used. The Galantine ingredients at the end belong to a different recipe.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it will take frying heat without burning; ghee is close kin, though it is cooked longer and tastes nuttier. Bring it to 340-360F. Plain butter at this temperature will blacken before the crumb colours.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz — a little under two-thirds of a US cup. It belongs to the galantine, not the rissoles.
- Sealing the roundsThe hinge of the dish. Egg-wash the border, keep the filling well back from the edge, and press out all trapped air before crimping. A rissole that leaks in hot butter will empty itself and spit.
- The crumb coatingBreadcrumbs mixed with finely chopped ham or truffle. Use dry white crumbs rather than panko for the fine Edwardian finish, and chill the coated rissoles for 20 minutes so the crust sets before frying. Two to three minutes a side will do if the mince is already-cooked meat, as rissole fillings usually were, though the recipe does not say so.
- Fried parsleyCurly parsley, washed and then dried completely; any clinging water will make the butter erupt. Drop the sprigs into the fat off the heat for 10-15 seconds only, until they stiffen and turn vivid green. Longer and they go brown and bitter.
- Périgord sauceA demi-glace or brown sauce finished with chopped truffle and often Madeira, named for the truffle country of southwest France. A good madeira sauce with a little truffle oil or preserved truffle stands in; bottled "truffle sauce" is not the same thing.
- Dishing upThe pyramid is a period presentation — rissoles stacked in a cone with the fried parsley tucked around the base. 'Hand Périgord sauce' means it went to table separately, in a boat rather than poured over the pastry, which softens within minutes.
Fried parsley was one of the standard garnishes of the late-Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchen, appearing beside fried fish, cutlets and rissoles in training manuals of the period; it cost nothing, took seconds, and gave a plate of uniformly brown fried objects a note of sharp green. The rissole itself ated cooked meat sealed in pastry, egged, crumbed and fried ated was use often said to have been made of the previous day's roast in a household that expected several courses. The P igord sauce named here signals the register the book is pitched at: truffles from the Dordogne, which may be chopped into the crumb as well as the sauce, mark the dish as fit for a dinner party rather than a family supper. The run-on text is a common artefact of these compilations, where recipes were set continuously and a page break could strand the beginning of one dish inside the end of another.