Potato Rissoles
INGREDIENTS.- Mashed potatoes, salt and pepper to taste; when liked, a very little minced parsley, egg and bread-crumbs.
Boil and mash the potatoes; add a seasoning of pepper and salt, and, when liked, a little minced parsley. Roll the potatoes into small balls, cover them with egg and SWEET POTATO. bread-crumbs, and fry in hot lard for about 10 minutes; let them drain before the fire, dish them on a napkin, and serve.
TIME.-10 minutes to fry the rissoles.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. The flavour of these rissoles may be very much increased by adding finely-minced tongue or ham, or even chopped onions when these are liked.
A straightforward potato croquette from the Beeton tradition, deep-fried and served plain or enriched with tongue, ham or onion. The only real difficulty is keeping the balls together in the fat.
- Dry the potatoesThe hinge of the dish: mash floury potatoes (Maris Piper, russet) and let the steam escape before shaping, or the rissoles will burst in the fat. Some cooks return the mash to a dry pan over low heat for a minute or two.
- BindingThe recipe relies on the egg-and-crumb coating alone. A whole egg or an extra yolk worked into the mash, and chilling the shaped balls for 30 minutes, makes them far more reliable.
- Frying timeTen minutes is far too long for a ball of cooked potato at proper frying heat. At 180C/350F they colour in 3-4 minutes; longer only darkens the crumb and drives fat into the interior.
- FatLard fries beautifully and is still sold, but any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not drop.
- Draining"Let them drain before the fire" means a warm spot, not the oven proper. A rack in a low oven at 120C/250F holds them without sogginess; paper towel on a plate traps steam.
- QuantitiesNo amounts are given, as often in Beeton; note that the method itself says to boil and mash the potatoes rather than assuming cold leftovers. Roughly 500g/1 lb of mash makes about a dozen walnut-sized rissoles, enough for four as a side dish.
- The additionsMinced tongue or ham should be finely chopped and kept to a modest proportion of the mash, or the balls lose cohesion. Raw onion is best softened in butter first; uncooked, it will still be sharp when the crumb is done.
Rissole comes from the Old French roissole, a fried pastry or forcemeat ball, and by the Victorian period the word in English kitchens had loosened to mean almost anything minced, bound, crumbed and fried. Beeton's book is full of such dishes, which may well have served as the honourable end of the joint: Monday's cold meat and the previous day's potatoes reappearing as something that looked like a course of its own. Here the tongue or ham appears in a closing note, and the instruction to dish them on a napkin was standard for fried food in nineteenth-century service, absorbing the fat.