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Lamb Rissoles
Use rule for Chicken Forcemeat. Add one fourth cup lamb and one fourth cup ham, each finely chopped, and proceed as with Chicken Rissoles.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already turned to the book's Chicken Forcemeat and Chicken Rissoles, and only tells you what to add. A few things need translating before it will work on a modern range.
- Read it as a chain of three recipesYou need the Chicken Forcemeat (a seasoned minced-meat mixture, in books of this period usually bound with a thick white sauce or panada), then the Chicken Rissoles method (shaping, egg-and-crumbing, frying). This page supplies only the lamb and ham addition.
- The meat is cooked, not rawThe meat is probably cooked, not raw -- rissole mixtures of this era are commonly built from meat already roasted or boiled and chopped fine, the fried rissole often being a leftovers dish, though the page itself says only 'finely chopped'. A quarter cup of each, finely minced and packed lightly, is roughly 1¼ to 1¾ oz.
- Bind it stiff, chill it hardThis is the hinge. The mixture must be thick enough to hold a shape cold; spread it on a plate and refrigerate at least an hour before forming. A soft, warm forcemeat bursts its crumb coating in the fat and empties into the pan.
- Frying temperaturePeriod books commonly say the fat is ready when it browns a bread cube in about forty seconds, which is generally reckoned at somewhere around 375-390F. Below 350F the crumbs soak fat; above 400F they colour before the centre heats through. Two to three minutes should be enough if the filling is already cooked.
- SaltHam of this date was often dry-cured and saltier than much supermarket ham today. Taste the forcemeat after adding both meats and hold back on additional salt until you have.
- Egg and crumb properlyDry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then dry crumbs again. A single coating will not survive the fat. Let the coated rissoles rest ten minutes so the crust sets.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other company cookbooks it padded its promotional confectionery chapters with a full general cookery course — which is why a French entrée like this sits in the same volume as the cocoa fudge. Rissole is the older word, from Old French roissole and ultimately Vulgar Latin russeola, 'reddish'; the verb rissoler, to brown or fry until russet, derives from it. In Anglo-American kitchens the word settled on a small ball or cone of bound minced meat, crumbed and deep-fried, as distinct from the pastry-wrapped rissole still found in Britain. Its place in the Entrées chapter is telling: on a formal menu of the day the entrée was a small made dish served between the fish and the roast, and made dishes of this kind were the respectable route by which yesterday's roast lamb and a scrap of ham returned to the table in company. The construction — cooked meat suspended in a stiff panada, chilled, coated and fried — is the same one that produces the croquette.