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Sardine Rissoles
Use one half rule of Chicken Rissoles. Add twelve boned sardines cut in pieces and two tablespoons lemon juice.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Chicken Rissoles in front of you and are halving it. A few points make the substitution work.
- "One half rule"A rule is a recipe. Make half a batch of the chicken rissole mixture and fold the fish into that.
- The sardinesTinned sardines in oil, drained, are the likely intent. "Boned" means lifting out the backbone; in modern tins it is soft enough to mash in, but picking it out gives a smoother mixture.
- SaltTinned sardines are already salted. Season the base lightly, add the fish and lemon, then taste before shaping.
- Lemon juice and the bindingTwo tablespoons of liquid will loosen the mixture. If it seems too soft to shape, chilling it before forming the rissoles should help.
- FryingRissoles of this period were generally breaded (flour, egg, crumbs) and fried in deep fat, though this entry specifies no method. The fat needs to be hot enough to set the crust before the soft filling bursts; fry in small batches so it does not cool.
- Cut in pieces, not mashedThe recipe calls for the sardines cut in pieces, which leaves flakes of fish distinct in the pale chicken base rather than worked to a paste.
Rissoles came into English cookery from the French kitchen, where the word classically meant a forcemeat enclosed in pastry and fried; the bound, highly seasoned mince, shaped, crumbed and fried, is the later English and American sense, and by the late nineteenth century such rissoles were one common answer to leftover cooked meat, appearing in cookbooks as a family of variations on one base mixture. That is roughly how this entry works: Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, gives the chicken rule first and then lets the sardine version ride on it in two lines. The sardine itself was a convenience food of the moment — imported by the case from Brittany and also packed in Maine, where canneries were operating from the 1870s — and tinned fish turns up constantly in books of this era wherever a cook needed savory flavor without a trip to the market.