Rissoles
Roll puff paste to one-eighth inch thickness, and cut in rounds. Place one teaspoon finely chopped seasoned meat moistened with Thick White Sauce on each round. Brush each piece with cold water half-way round close to edge. Fold like a turnover, and press edges together. Dip in egg slightly beaten and diluted with one tablespoon water. Roll in gelatine, fry in deep fat, and drain. Granulated gelatine cannot be used.
Filling for Rissoles. Mix one-half cup finely chopped cold cooked chicken with one-fourth cup finely chopped cooked ham. Moisten with Thick White Sauce, and season with salt and cayenne.
A leftovers dish dressed for company: chopped chicken and ham bound with a very stiff white sauce, sealed in puff pastry and deep fried. Two things decide whether it works — how dry the filling is, and how cold the pastry is when it hits the fat.
- Thick White SauceFarmer gives a thicker white sauce for binding mixtures like this, with considerably more butter and flour per cup of milk than her ordinary one (on the order of 3 to 4 tablespoons of each to the cup). It should be stiff rather than pourable: an ordinary pourable béchamel will steam inside the pastry and burst the seam in the fat.
- The gelatine coatingThis is the strangest line in the recipe and it is not a typo, though the recipe never explains itself. The likeliest reading is sheet gelatine crushed to coarse crumbs and used as a crisp breading; the granulated kind she forbids would presumably dissolve rather than stay crisp. Fine dry breadcrumbs do the same job and are what a modern kitchen would reach for.
- Chill before fryingFill, seal, egg, coat, then refrigerate the rissoles at least 30 minutes. Cold puff paste puffs; warm puff paste leaks butter and the layers slump.
- Deep fat temperatureThe book judges deep fat by browning a cube of bread in it: the quicker test for mixtures already cooked, the slower one for raw mixtures, and a raw puff paste casing argues for the slower guide. In modern terms that is somewhere around 360-375°F, approximately. Below that the pastry absorbs grease before it rises; above it, the outside colours before the filling is hot.
- Sealing the edgeBrush cold water only on the half-inch nearest the rim and press with a fork, not just fingers. Any filling caught in the seam will wick fat inward and open the turnover.
- Rounds and yieldA 2½ to 3 inch cutter is the right scale for one teaspoon of filling. The half-cup of chicken and quarter-cup of ham, once moistened with sauce, will fill several dozen rounds at a teaspoon apiece.
- CayenneSeason the filling assertively while it is warm and taste it then. Fried pastry mutes salt and pepper, and a filling that tastes correct in the bowl will read as flat inside the crust.
Rissole comes into English from French, where the older form roussole is generally traced to the Latin for reddish — the colour of something fried brown. In classic French usage a rissole is minced meat enclosed in pastry and fried, distinct from the breadcrumbed croquette, though English and American cookbooks blurred the two thoroughly by the nineteenth century. Its place in Fannie Farmer is telling: the Boston Cooking School taught an economy in which cold cooked chicken and a scrap of ham were not leftovers to be eaten plainly but raw material for a made dish. The gelatine coating belongs to the same era of ambitious technique, when gelatine arrived as brittle sheets that could be crushed, alongside the newer granulated product sold in envelopes.