No. 948

Rissoles of Chicken

Rissoles de Volaille

Slice half a pound of chicken and cut it into Julienne (No.318), as well as four ounces of mushrooms and two ounces of peeled truffles; mix them in with five gills of veloute sauce (No. 415) previously thickened with raw egg-yolks, cream and butter; set it on the fire, and stir steadily until it boils, then remove and set the preparation aside to cool. With this preparation make some rissoles; bread-crumb them the same as explained in No. 161 and fry in very hot white frying fat; dress on a folded napkin and decorate the top with fried, parsley. All rissoles are dressed and decorated the same.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with a stockpot always going, and he cross-references half the book rather than repeat himself. The gaps are worth filling in before you start.

The hinge: chill it hardThe filling must be cold and stiff before it is shaped, or the rissoles collapse in the fat. Spread the cooked mixture on a buttered tray no more than an inch deep, press film to the surface and refrigerate several hours or overnight.
Five gillsA gill is a quarter-pint, so five gills is about two and a half cups of velouté. With only half a pound of chicken and six ounces of garnish that gives a very soft mixture, which is why the egg-yolk liaison and the chilling both matter.
Velouté with a liaisonNo. 415 is a white stock sauce thickened with a blond roux. Finished here with raw yolks, cream and butter, it wants to be brought just to the boil while stirring steadily and then pulled off at once; held at a rolling boil the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks.
JulienneNo. 318 is Ranhofer's matchstick cut; the exact dimensions belong to that entry rather than to this page. Poached or roast chicken breast, cooled, cuts cleanly; hot meat shreds.
What a rissole actually isRanhofer assumes you know: the cold filling is enclosed in thin puff-paste trimmings or a rolled short paste, sealed into turnovers or rounds, then egg-and-crumbed. Without the pastry these are croquettes, which is a fine dish but not what is meant here.
BreadingNo. 161 is Ranhofer's standard egg-and-crumb procedure: beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs, patted firm. A second pass through egg and crumbs on the seams is cheap insurance.
White frying fat, very hotHe means a neutral, odourless fat: clarified lard or refined beef fat would have been usual in his kitchen, any high-smoke-point oil now. No temperature is given; in modern terms very hot is around 375F, and since the filling is already cooked the job is simply to colour the crust before the interior liquefies and bursts.
Truffles and mushroomsTwo ounces of peeled black truffle is a luxury line item now rather than a pantry staple; the dish works with the mushrooms alone, or with a smaller quantity of truffle plus a little of its juice in the sauce. Skip truffle oil.
YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest a couple of dozen small rissoles, enough for a hot side dish for six or so. Fried parsley means whole sprigs, bone dry, dropped into the fat for a few seconds — wet parsley spits violently.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summation of more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised like a professional reference rather than a home cookbook — hence the numbered cross-references and the closing note that all rissoles are dressed alike, which saves him repeating himself across a dozen variants. The word comes from the Old French roissole, generally traced to a late Latin root meaning reddish, for the colour of the fried crust; medieval and early modern French rissoles were small enclosed fritters of chopped meat, and by the nineteenth century the form had settled into a pastry case around a bound, cooled salpicon. Its place among the hot side dishes reflects the service of the period, when a fried entrée of this kind arrived between heavier courses at a long dinner, dressed on a folded napkin to absorb fat and heaped with fried parsley for colour.