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Chicken Rissoles
Cook together in a saucepan 1 tablespoonful of butter and 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, add ½ of a cupful of milk and stir to make a thick, smooth paste. Season with salt, pepper, a few drops of onion juice, add 1 tablespoonful of cream and 1 cupful of finely chopped, cooked chicken; cook for a moment longer and set aside until cold.
Roll out scraps of puff paste in a very thin sheet and cut in pieces three by four inches. Mold the chicken mixture in rolls as thick as the little finger and three inches long. Enclose each in a piece of the paste, wetting the edges and ends and pressing them together so that they will not become fat-soaked in the cooking. Dip each into slightly beaten egg and roll in fine crumbs.
Have a deep saucepan partly filled with smoking hot fat. Immerse two or three at a time in the fat, and draw the saucepan back a little so that the rissoles will cook golden brown in four minutes. Reheat the fat each time that more are cooked.
A very thick béchamel bound with chopped chicken, chilled firm, wrapped in puff pastry and deep-fried. The whole thing stands or falls on the filling being cold and the pastry sealed.
- Chill the filling properly"Set aside until cold" means fully cold and stiff — spread it on a plate and refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight. A filling that is merely cool will slump when the rissoles hit the fat and burst the seam.
- The paste ratio1 tablespoon butter, 2 tablespoons flour and half a cup of milk gives a panade far thicker than a sauce; it should pull away from the pan in a mass. Cook the flour and butter a minute before the milk goes in or the filling tastes raw and pasty.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning made by grating an onion and pressing out the liquid. A quarter teaspoon of grated onion pressed through a fine sieve, or a pinch of onion powder, does the same job without adding moisture.
- Puff paste scrapsThe recipe assumes you have trimmings from another pastry job. All-butter frozen puff pastry works; roll it thin and keep it cold. Re-rolled scraps puff unevenly, which may be part of why they were directed to rissoles rather than to a tart.
- SealingThe warning about becoming "fat-soaked" is the hinge. Brush the edges with water, press hard with a fork or the back of a knife, and check every seam before crumbing — a single gap lets hot fat into the filling and the rissole floods.
- Fat temperature"Smoking hot fat" then drawn back suggests something in the usual deep-frying range, roughly 350-375F. Modern refined oils smoke well above frying temperature, so use a thermometer rather than the visual cue. Four minutes should brown the crumb and heat the filling through; the recipe's own limit of two or three at a time keeps the fat from dropping and giving greasy pastry.
- Between batches"Reheat the fat each time" is not optional — let the oil come back up to temperature before the next batch goes in, and drain the finished rissoles on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- YieldAt the size given -- rolls as thick as the little finger and three inches long -- a cupful of chicken and its sauce will make well more than eight; expect a dozen or more small rissoles, enough for a first course for several or a light supper with a salad. They are best eaten soon after frying.
Rissole comes from Old French, ultimately from a Latin root meaning reddened or browned, and the word has covered a wide range of small fried parcels for centuries — sometimes pastry-wrapped, sometimes just a breadcrumbed croquette. This version, a thick white sauce carrying finely chopped cooked meat, is the classic croquette method that runs through late nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American cookery. The instruction to use "scraps of puff paste" points to an economical intent: one cupful of leftover chicken and a handful of pastry trimmings stretches to something that looks like a made dish, and the rissole was a common destination for odd meat and odd pastry.