Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Forcemeat Rissoles
Forcemeat Rissoles
Roll about a quarter of a pound of good puff paste on a board to the thickness of about half an inch and cut it into small rounds with a paste-cutter; put a little forcemeat on each one, wet the edges and cover them over with another round of paste. Mark the top with the paste-cutter and press round the edges. Put some butter into a fryingpan, and when it is boiling put in the rissoles and fry them until done. Take them out, drain, and serve on a dish-paper.
A short entry that assumes you already have forcemeat on hand and know what to do with it. Two things need attention before you start: what goes inside, and how thin the pastry should be.
- ForcemeatSeasoned ground meat, poultry, game or fish, usually bound with panada, egg or fat. In a kitchen like the Waldorf's forcemeat would plausibly have been made in quantity for quenelles and stuffings, with rissoles one likely use for what was left. Use a forcemeat that is already cooked and cooled, or expect to finish the rissoles in a 375F oven, since a few minutes in shallow butter will not bring a raw meat filling to 165F.
- Roll thinner than statedHalf an inch of puff paste is far too thick for a small fried turnover; the interior will still be raw dough when the outside colors. Roll to about 1/8 inch and cut rounds of 2 to 2 1/2 inches.
- SealingWater alone on puff paste edges is a weak seal once the layers start to lift. Press firmly with the back of a fork or crimp with your fingers, and chill the assembled rissoles 20 minutes so the butter in the paste is firm when it hits the pan.
- "Boiling" butterWhole butter browns and its milk solids burn around 250F. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half neutral oil, at 350 to 360F the foaming should have subsided and the fat should shimmer.
- Frying puff pasteShallow-fry, turning once, three to four minutes a side. Puff paste rises unevenly in fat, so keep the depth at about 1/2 inch and do not crowd the pan.
- QuantityA quarter pound of paste is roughly 115 g and should yield somewhere around half a dozen to ten small rissoles, depending how thinly you roll and how large you cut them -- an appetizer portion for two to three people. Allow roughly 4 to 5 oz of forcemeat to fill them.
- Dish-paperA pierced or lace-cut paper laid on the platter to absorb fat, closely related to the paper doilies still sold for the purpose. A folded napkin or a plain sheet of parchment does the same work.
Rissole goes back to Old French roissole, from a Latin root meaning reddish (the same root as the verb rissoler, to brown), and by the nineteenth century the word covered a family of small fried pastries filled with chopped meat -- sometimes wrapped in puff paste, as here, sometimes breaded and fried without any pastry at all. Its usefulness in a hotel kitchen was probably economic: forcemeat was mixed in bulk for quenelles, galantines and stuffings, and whatever was left at the end of service could plausibly be turned into rissoles for the next day's luncheon or a savory garnish. The brevity of Oscar Tschirky's entry is itself telling -- the book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, was written for readers assumed to know what forcemeat was and to have some already made.