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Potato Rissoles
Mash potatoes, salt and pepper to taste, if desired add a little parsley. Roll the potatoes into small balls, cover them with an egg and bread-crumbs, and fry in hot lard for about two minutes. Finely minced tongue or ham may be added with good effect, or even chopped onions when liked.
A short entry that assumes you already have leftover mashed potato and a pot of fat on the stove. The details worth pinning down are fat temperature, how to keep the balls from bursting, and how much potato this actually takes.
- Fat and temperatureLard suits the flavour and stands up to frying, but any neutral frying fat works. The recipe says only "hot"; in practice that is around 350-375F. Cooler than that and the crumb coating soaks fat; hotter and the crust colours before the centre warms through.
- Two minutes is rightEverything inside is already cooked, so the frying is only to set the coating and heat the middle. Two to three minutes at temperature, turning once if they are not fully submerged, is the whole job.
- Dry the potatoThe hinge of the recipe. Mashed potato loose with milk or cream will slump in the fat and split the crust. Use a stiff, dryish mash — riced or passed through a sieve, no added liquid — and chill the shaped balls for 30 minutes before coating.
- "Cover them with an egg"This is the standard breading sequence, compressed: a light dusting of flour, then beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs. The flour step is unstated but keeps the egg from sliding off damp potato.
- Bread-crumbsPeriod crumbs were dried and sieved from stale bread, closer to today's fine dry crumbs than to fresh panko. Either works; fine dry crumbs give the smoother, more uniform shell the recipe has in mind.
- Tongue and hamCold boiled tongue appears often in cookbooks of the period and is now a special order. Minced ham, or any cooked salted meat, fills the same role. Cook chopped onion first — raw onion will still be crunchy after two minutes in fat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; scale it to whatever mashed potato you have. Roughly a pound will make a side dish for two or three. Drain on paper and salt while hot.
Rissole comes from the Old French roissole, a fried pastry or forcemeat ball, and by the nineteenth century English and American cookbooks used it loosely for almost anything minced, bound, coated and fried. Recipes like this one belong to the frugal end of the vegetable chapter: they exist to use up yesterday's mashed potatoes, and the optional tongue, ham or onion tells you what scraps a household of the period was likely to have on hand. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) was one of many regional adaptations of the Buckeye compilations, and its vegetable section carries a good deal of this kind of English-derived plain cookery alongside the more distinctly Southern material.