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Chicken Rissoles
Make a well flavored mixture of mushrooms, pickled tongue and the meat of a cold fowl, all cooked; thicken with a little bechamel sauce reduced with glaze, and set it in a basin to cool. Prepare three-quarters of a pound of puff paste and roll it out into long, thin strips with the edges trimmed, then take a little of the mixture at a time with a small spoon and place it at intervals on the paste, leaving about one inch clear from the edge. Wet the edge of the paste and fold it over so as to completely cover in the chicken mixture; then with a channeled paste-cutter cut the paste into rissoles, having the meat in the center of the cutter. Roll out the rest of the paste, and continue until all the rissoles are made. Dip each one separately into well-beaten egg and put them in a fryingpan of fat over a slow fire. When done take them out, put them on a dish with a folded napkin, and serve.
A use-up dish for leftover roast fowl, dressed up in puff pastry. Everything hinges on the filling being cold and stiff before it meets the paste.
- Chill the filling hardThe mixture must be set firm — refrigerate it at least two hours, ideally overnight. A loose, warm filling will soak the paste, blow the seal, and spill fat-flecked sauce into the frying pan.
- Glaze"Glaze" here is glace de viande, veal or chicken stock reduced to a syrupy, near-solid concentrate. A teaspoon of commercial demi-glace or a reduced-down cube of good stock does the same job: it is there for flavour and body, not liquid.
- Bechamel proportionsThe recipe gives no quantities beyond "a little." Aim for a very thick sauce — roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk — and use only enough to bind; about a cup of sauce to three cups of chopped meat and mushrooms works.
- Pickled tongueCured beef tongue, sold ready-cooked at some delis and Jewish butchers. It is salty and faintly spiced; finely diced ham, or a little prosciutto, gives a comparable note if tongue is unavailable.
- Puff paste quantityThree-quarters of a pound is about 340 g, roughly one and a half standard sheets of all-butter frozen puff pastry. Keep it cold while you work and chill the shaped rissoles for twenty minutes before frying.
- SealingPress out all air around each mound of filling before cutting, and crimp the cut edges firmly. Trapped steam and a weak seal are what make these burst in the fat.
- "A slow fire"The recipe gives no temperature. For deep-frying pastry a moderate, steady heat of around 325–350°F suits: hotter and the outside colours before the layers cook through; cooler and the paste drinks oil. Roughly four to five minutes, turning once, until deep gold.
- Egg wash onlyOscar dips in beaten egg with no crumb coating; the egg sets into a thin skin that helps hold the seal. Drain on paper rather than the folded napkin of the original, which would have absorbed some grease at table.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. From three-quarters of a pound of paste expect roughly eighteen to twenty rissoles of about 2½ inches — a first course for six, or a substantial luncheon dish for four.
A rissole is a piece of meat enclosed in pastry and fried, from the Old French roissole, generally traced back to a Latin root meaning "reddish" — the colour of the finished crust. By the late nineteenth century the word had settled in English kitchens as a way of turning yesterday's roast into something presentable. Oscar Tschirky's version is squarely in the escoffier-era hotel idiom: cold fowl, mushrooms and pickled tongue bound with a reduced bechamel, which is to say the trimmings of an expensive kitchen recycled into a course a hotel could charge for. The folded napkin on the serving dish was a general service convention, used for fried and other dishes.