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Lobster Rissoles
Place a teaspoon of creamed lobster in the center of each round of pastry, and proceed as for Chicken Rissoles, baking in a quick oven instead of frying, if desired. Bouchées à la Macedoine Mix one fourth cup cold cooked chicken, one fourth cup mushrooms, and one fourth cup cheese. Add one fourth cup White Sauce, season with salt, paprika, and lemon juice. Fill Bouchées and serve garnished with parsley. 6 chicken legs
Two short entrée notes that both lean on recipes elsewhere in the book: the rissoles assume you have already read the chicken version, and the bouchées assume you have puff-pastry cases on hand. A few conversions and one filling rule cover most of it.
- "A quick oven"In period usage roughly 400–450°F. At that heat rissoles made with puff or rich pie pastry are likely to need only 12–15 minutes, until the pastry is set and browned; the filling is already cooked, so you are only baking the crust.
- What "proceed as for Chicken Rissoles" meansThe chicken recipe is not on this page, but rissoles of this type are usually made by moistening the edge of each pastry round, folding it over the filling into a half-moon and pressing or crimping the edge shut, then egg-washing and crumbing before cooking. If you bake rather than fry, the crumbs are generally omitted and the pastry brushed with beaten egg for colour.
- Creamed lobster must be cold and stiffCreamed lobster is best cold and stiff -- the lobster is bound in a thick white sauce, and a well-chilled filling is much easier to handle; a warm or loose one will soak the round and may burst the seam in the oven. It can be made ahead.
- BouchéesFrench for "mouthfuls": small puff-pastry cases baked hollow, essentially miniature vol-au-vents. Frozen puff pastry cases or shop-bought vol-au-vent shells do the job. Fill them just before serving so the base stays crisp.
- MacédoineA mixture of small even dice, usually of vegetables. Here the name is being used loosely for the diced chicken, mushroom and cheese; cut everything to about a quarter inch so the filling spoons neatly.
- The mushrooms and the cheeseThe mushrooms are best cooked rather than raw: sauté them and let them give up their liquid, or the filling will thin out. A firm cheese that melts, grated, suits the mixture; a quarter cup grated is roughly an ounce.
- White SauceA white sauce of the usual medium sort, conventionally about two tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, cooked out. A quarter cup is barely enough to bind three quarters of a cup of solids, which is the point -- it should cling, not pour.
- "6 chicken legs"An apparently stray line, seemingly a fragment of an adjacent recipe. It has nothing to do with either dish here.
- YieldThe bouchée filling comes to about a cup in all, enough for perhaps 8–10 small cases as a first course, or more as canapés.
Both of these belong to the fussy, small-portion service of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table, where an entrée was not the main course but a made dish served between heavier ones — and where the point was to turn yesterday's cooked chicken or a modest amount of expensive lobster into something that looked considered. Rissoles are the frugal end of that idea, a bound and seasoned mixture sealed in pastry; the name is generally traced to an Old French word for something reddish. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, published cook books to promote its cocoa, but the volumes were built as full household references.