Rissoles
Take puff paste-the lighter the better, and roll it out to the thickness of a penny. Cut rounds in it about three inches in diameter. Into the centre of each place some croquette meat. Double the paste over. Fry them in hot fat, and serve them on a napkin with fried parsley.
A short entry that assumes you already have croquette mixture on hand — which is the real work. Everything else is turnover assembly and a fry basket.
- The hinge: the filling must be cold and stiff"Croquette meat" here means cooked minced meat bound with a very thick béchamel or reduced velouté, spread on a plate and chilled until it can be handled like putty. Warm or loose filling will burst the paste in the fat and empty itself into the pan.
- "Thickness of a penny"A Victorian bronze penny was roughly 1.5 mm, so roll to something around or just under 1/16 inch. Thinner than most modern puff-pastry instructions, and deliberately so — the paste is a wrapper, not the dish.
- SealingDallas says only to double the paste over. Brush the border with water or beaten egg, press firmly, and crimp; unsealed rissoles leak. A tablespoon of filling in a three-inch round is the most that will close cleanly.
- Fat temperature"hot fat" is left unspecified. In modern terms, deep fat at the point where a cube of bread browns in under a minute, 350-375F: below that the paste absorbs fat and never puffs; much above it, the outside colours before the filling heats through. Three to four minutes a batch.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly, then drop them into the same fat for about 20-30 seconds until they stop hissing and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley spits violently. Fry it after the rissoles, not before.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin on the serving dish was the standard Victorian way to blot and present anything deep-fried. A rack lined with paper does the same job; move them to the napkin at the last moment if you want the period look.
- Puff pasteAll-butter frozen puff pastry works, but let it come to rolling temperature rather than fighting it cold, and chill the assembled rissoles for 20 minutes before frying so the layers stay distinct.
- YieldNot stated. A single sheet of bought puff pastry gives roughly ten to twelve three-inch rounds — a first course for four, or a savoury for six.
Rissole comes through Old French, ultimately from Latin russeus, reddish — the same root that gives rissoler, to brown in frying — and the word has covered a wide family of small fried things since medieval French cookery: sometimes a breadcrumbed patty, sometimes, as here, a filled pastry turnover. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written by the journalist E. S. Dallas around the reputation of Kettner's restaurant in Soho, is arranged as a dictionary, so entries cross-refer rather than repeat themselves: this one leans entirely on the separate article for croquettes and simply tells you what to do with the mixture once you have it. The fried parsley garnish is now largely gone, but was a common feature of nineteenth-century service.