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Veal Rissoles
Use rule for Chicken Forcemeat, substituting veal for chicken, and proceed as for Chicken Rissoles.
This is a cross-reference entry: it tells you to make the book's chicken forcemeat with veal and shape and fry it as for chicken rissoles. Everything that matters is in those two parent recipes, so the notes below cover what a modern cook needs to reconstruct them.
- What a forcemeat is hereIn cookbooks of this period, forcemeat of this type is usually finely chopped or pounded meat bound with a thick white sauce (a panada of butter, flour and milk or stock) and seasoned; check the book's own Chicken Forcemeat rule for the exact seasonings and whether egg is used. In this dish it functions as a croquette mixture rather than a sausage stuffing.
- Veal is leaner and blander than chickenCooked veal has less fat and a milder flavour than the dark meat of a fowl, so the mixture can taste flat and dry. Season more assertively than the chicken version and keep the binding sauce on the rich side.
- Chill before shapingThe hinge of any rissole is a mixture cold enough to hold its shape. Spread it in a shallow pan, chill until firm (an hour or more), then shape. Warm forcemeat will burst its coating in the fat.
- CoatingStandard practice of the period, and still the right one: fine dry crumbs, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again. Let the coated rissoles rest 15-30 minutes in the refrigerator so the crust sets.
- Frying temperaturePeriod books gauge the fat by browning a cube of bread; the forty-second test used for cooked mixtures corresponds roughly to 375-385F, though this entry itself gives no such direction. The interior is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust and heating through -- two to three minutes is usually enough.
- Some versions use pastryRissole is used loosely in English-language books. If the book's chicken rissole recipe wraps the forcemeat in puff paste or a turnover of pastry rather than crumbing it, follow that; the veal substitution is the only change intended here.
- Yield and servingThe entry gives no quantities; a pound of cooked veal with its sauce would make roughly a dozen small rissoles. Serve at once on a folded napkin or with a tomato or brown sauce; they soften within minutes of leaving the fat.
Lowney's, published by the Massachusetts chocolate company, is a general household cookbook of the sort that filled its entree section with made-over dishes: yesterday's roast reappearing as croquettes, cutlets, timbales and rissoles. The cross-reference format here -- "use rule for Chicken Forcemeat, substituting veal" -- was normal in period cookbooks, which treated recipes as a set of base preparations to be varied rather than as standalone pages, and "rule" was the ordinary New England word for what we would call a recipe. Veal was a common meat in American cities before the mid-twentieth century, and its mildness made it a favorite for forcemeats and quenelles, where the point was texture rather than pronounced flavor. The word rissole comes through French from a root meaning to redden or brown, and it has been applied variously to pastry-wrapped and crumb-coated fried parcels for centuries.