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Oyster Rissoles
Prepare the same as Chicken Rissoles, and add one cup chopped cooked oysters.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on the base recipe: a stiff, well-seasoned forcemeat bound with thick white sauce, chilled, shaped, crumbed and fried. Everything that can go wrong here goes wrong with the oysters or the binding.
- Cook the oysters barely at allThe recipe assumes oysters already cooked and gives no method. If you are poaching them yourself, keep it brief, in their own liquor just until the edges ruffle. They will be fried again inside the rissole, and oysters simmered to firmness first come out as rubber pellets.
- Drain them hard before choppingA cup of chopped oysters carries a surprising amount of liquor, and that liquor will slacken the binding sauce until the rissoles refuse to hold shape. Drain, blot dry, then chop. Reduce the reserved liquor and beat it into the sauce if you want the flavour back.
- Make the panada stiffer than seems rightThe base white sauce for rissole forcemeat should be thick enough to hold a spoon upright, closer to a paste than a sauce. With a cup of extra solids going in, err on the stiff side.
- Chill before shapingSpread the mixture shallow on a plate and chill it thoroughly before rolling into balls or cork shapes. Warm forcemeat will burst in the fat. No chilling time is given in the recipe.
- Crumb twiceEgg and crumb, rest ten minutes, then egg and crumb again. A single coat over a moist oyster filling tends to split, and split rissoles empty themselves into the fryer.
- Fat temperatureNeither this recipe nor its base gives one. Cooks of the period commonly gauged frying fat by how quickly a bread cube browned; a forty-second browning is usually glossed today as roughly 375F. At that heat rissoles of this size take two to three minutes.
- SeasoningThe recipe specifies none. Oysters are salty and the sauce is bland; taste the chilled mixture before shaping. Cayenne, mace and lemon all appear in period oyster forcemeats and all three suit it.
- YieldDepends entirely on the base chicken rissole, whose quantities are not given here. Rissoles of this kind were served as an entree in the old sense of a small dish between fish and roast.
Rissoles reached American cookbooks through French practice, where a rissole is classically a small fried item of forcemeat, usually enclosed in pastry. That is why this entry is a single line: the chicken version does the work, and the oyster version is a substitution built on it. Oysters were still cheap and abundant on the East Coast when Lowney's book appeared in the first decade of the century, sold shucked by the quart and used with a freedom that reads as luxurious now. The book itself came from the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it carried a full general repertoire alongside the chocolate recipes that justified its existence.