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Savory Rice Rissoles
4 ounces of rice 1 ounce of butter 1 small onion 4 large sage leaves 1/2 pint milk A little pepper and salt Wash the rice carefully, and cook for half an hour in the milk; then add the butter, and very finely chopped sage and onion, and pepper. Boil for a few minutes longer, and when cool form into shape, roll in fine rusk crumbs, and fry a light brown in boiling oil. Serve round a mold of mashed potatoes.
A simple milk-cooked rice croquette that depends entirely on how stiff the rice gets. Everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: cook the rice dryThe mixture must be thick enough to hold a shape with no egg or flour to bind it. Cook the rice until the milk is fully absorbed and the mass pulls away from the pan in a single mound; if any liquid is left the rissoles will slump in the fryer.
- Quantities in modern terms4 ounces of rice is about 115 g, or a scant 2/3 cup. A half pint of milk is 10 fl oz if the book is British, 8 fl oz if American; either way, be ready to add a splash more as the rice swells, since short-grain rice absorbs roughly two to three times its volume of liquid.
- Use a short-grain riceThirty minutes in milk suits pudding rice, arborio or any round-grain type that releases starch and clings. Long-grain basmati stays separate and will not bind into a rissole.
- Soften the onion firstOnion chopped fine and boiled for "a few minutes longer" stays sharp and crunchy. Sweat it in the ounce of butter until translucent, then stir butter and onion together into the cooked rice with the sage.
- SageFour large fresh leaves, chopped very fine, is roughly a teaspoon; about half a teaspoon of dried rubbed sage stands in. Sage is assertive, and the whole character of the dish rests on it against the milk and rice.
- Rusk crumbsRusk is twice-baked unsweetened bread, sold now as a baby food or as Dutch beschuit. Fine dried breadcrumbs or panko crushed a little finer do the same job.
- Chill before shaping"When cool" is worth taking further: spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate an hour until firm before rolling into balls or small flattened cylinders. Cold rissoles hold their crust; warm ones break open.
- "Boiling oil""Boiling oil" points to deep frying; in modern terms roughly 350-375F. The rissoles are already cooked through, so they need only two or three minutes to colour; a thermometer prevents the crumb burning before the outside sets.
- Yield and servingMakes eight to ten small rissoles, enough for two or three as a main course. The original arrangement, a ring of rissoles around a mound of mashed potato, was a common presentation of the period and still works on a warmed platter.
Rissole comes from the Old French roissole, a fried pastry or forcemeat ball, and by the nineteenth century the word covered almost any small crumbed and fried patty in English kitchens. Meatless cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leaned heavily on this shape: it was a familiar form on the dinner table, so filling it with rice, lentils or breadcrumbs let a cook serve something recognisably like a meat course without the meat. Such books had two overlapping audiences, the vegetarian societies that grew out of Victorian temperance and health reform, and ordinary households looking to stretch a budget or observe Lent and Friday abstinence. Cooking the rice in milk rather than water, and binding with butter alone, is characteristic of the genre's reliance on dairy for the richness meat would otherwise have supplied.