Home › Meat Substitutes › Mock Beef Rissoles
Mock Beef Rissoles
3 ounces fine rusk-crumbs 3 ounces grated cheese 3/4 pint of milk 1 teaspoon made mustard 3 ounces grated horse-radish Mix well together the rusk-crumbs, cheese, mustard, pepper and horse-radish. Boil the milk, and pour it over them, allowing it to stand for one hour. Mix all together, roll in fine rusk-crumbs and fry in boiling oil. Serve very hot.
A soft cheese-and-horseradish croquette from the era of meatless "mock" cookery. The whole success of it lies in getting the mixture stiff enough to hold together in hot fat.
- The hinge: a stiff mixtureThree-quarters of a pint of milk to 3 ounces of crumbs gives a very loose paste, and loose rissoles collapse in the fryer. After the hour's soaking, work in more rusk crumbs until the mass holds its shape when squeezed, and chill it for 30 minutes before shaping.
- Rusk-crumbsRusk is a hard, twice-baked bread. Plain dried breadcrumbs or crushed unsweetened melba toast are the closest modern stand-ins; panko is too coarse and absorbs differently. Avoid sweetened commercial rusks.
- 3/4 pintThis is a British book, so 15 fl oz, a little under 2 US cups. Add it in stages rather than all at once so you can judge the consistency.
- PepperThe method calls for pepper but the ingredient list omits it. Season to taste, about 1/4 teaspoon ground black or white pepper, plus salt, which the recipe does not mention at all and which the dish needs.
- Horse-radishThree ounces of freshly grated root is aggressively hot, roughly 3/4 cup packed. Jarred prepared horseradish is milder and already wet, so drain it well and reduce the milk accordingly; start with half the quantity and taste.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard paste, not dry powder. An English mustard is the period-appropriate choice.
- Boiling oilOil does not boil at frying temperature; the phrase simply means hot deep fat, 350-375F. The rissoles are already cooked in effect, so fry only until the crumb coat is deep gold, two to three minutes.
- Coating and yieldA single roll in dry crumbs is fragile on a wet mixture; an egg wash between two crumb coats holds far better. Depending on how much extra crumb is worked in, the quantities should make roughly eight small rissoles -- enough for two or three as a light dish with potatoes or a sharp green salad.
"Mock" dishes fill the meat-substitute chapters of British and American cookery books from the late nineteenth century through the two world wars, driven partly by the vegetarian societies that grew up around Manchester and London and partly, later, by rationing. The logic here is flavour mimicry rather than protein matching: beef in the English kitchen was served with horseradish, so a fried cake carrying enough grated horseradish and mustard was meant to read as beef on the tongue, with cheese supplying the richness and the rusk the body. The word rissole comes into English from Old French, ultimately from a Latin word meaning reddish-brown; the French verb rissoler, to brown, belongs to the same family rather than being the source. By this period the word had settled in English to mean any small crumbed and fried cake of chopped or minced stuff. Rusk appears often in these books because it was a cheap larder staple with a long life, reliably dry enough to grate to a fine crumb, a role now largely taken by packet breadcrumbs.