No. 954

Rissoles of Red Tongue or of Sweetbreads

Rissoles de Langue Ecarlate ou de Ris de Veau

Red Tongue.—Reduce one pint and a half of espagnole sauce (No. 414), with a little meat glaze (No. 402), and two spoonfuls of Madeira wine, add to it one pound of red veal tongue cooked and cooled under a weight, then cut into three-sixteenth inch squares, eight ounces of mushrooms and two ounces of truffles, the two latter articles being cut into eighth of inch pieces; heat the mixture well until boiling point is reached, then set it aside to get cold. Use this preparation for making the rissoles the same as No. 161, and serve them on folded napkins.

Sweetbreads.—Fry one ounce of chopped up onions in butter with one pound of braised sweetbreads previously pressed under a weight to reduce it to three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness, then cut into Julienne; add some cooked and well drained mushrooms, diluting the whole with veloute sauce (No. 415), thicken properly with egg-yolks, cream and fresh butter, add chopped parsley, salt, pepper and nutmeg, set this preparation aside to cool and finish the rissoles as for No. 161. Serve on folded napkins.

← No. 953 Rissoles of Mushroom and Marrow Hot Side Dishes No. 955 Rissoles of Partridge a la Waddington →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two fillings for the same fried pastry, from Ranhofer's cross-referenced system. Almost everything you need is in the numbers he sends you off to, so the notes below fill those gaps first.

The hinge: the filling must be cold and stiffBoth mixtures are cooked, then set aside to cool before they are enclosed. Warm or loose filling will burst the pastry in the fat. Chill the mixture until it holds a shape on a spoon, ideally several hours or overnight.
What No. 161 amounts toRissoles of this type are spoonfuls of cold filling sealed in rounds of thin pastry or dough and deep-fried until browned; the exact wrapper and coating are set out under No. 161, which is not reproduced here. Fry in fat hot enough to brown them quickly -- around 350-375F on a modern thermometer -- and only a few minutes, since the filling is already cooked through.
Espagnole and velouteEspagnole (No. 414) is a brown sauce built on brown roux and brown stock with a vegetable garnish; veloute (No. 415) is the same idea with white stock and pale roux. A good reduced brown sauce or demi-glace and a well-made cream-thickened white sauce stand in acceptably. Ranhofer does not say how far the pint and a half should be taken down, only that it be reduced: work it until it coats heavily.
Meat glazeNo. 402 is glace de viande: stock reduced to a syrup that sets rubbery when cold. A teaspoon or two of commercial demi-glace concentrate does the same job of adding depth and body.
Red or scarlet tongueLangue ecarlate is veal or beef tongue brined with nitre, which fixes the pink colour; the modern equivalent is cured or corned tongue, sold cooked and pressed at good delicatessens. Fresh tongue will taste right but will be grey-brown, not scarlet.
Pressing under a weightBoth fillings call for the cooked meat to be pressed cold between plates or in a terrine under a weight. This compacts it so it cuts cleanly into the specified dice, about 5 mm for the tongue, or into julienne for the sweetbreads. Unpressed sweetbread shreds and will not dice.
The egg-yolk liaisonThe sweetbread mixture is thickened with yolks, cream and butter off the boil. Once the yolks go in, keep the pan below a simmer or it will curdle; it will firm considerably as it chills, which is what you want.
TrufflesTwo ounces of fresh truffle is a luxury few will match. Preserved truffle peelings, or simply an extra ounce of well-drained mushroom with a few drops of truffle-scented oil at the end, keeps the balance without pretending to the original.
Yield and serviceA pound of meat with the mushrooms and reduced sauce makes a generous quantity of filling; how many rissoles it yields depends entirely on how large you make them. Ranhofer gives no count and no number of covers. The folded napkin was the standard way of sending up fried items, and will take up some of the frying fat; paper serves the same purpose.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what came out of the Delmonico's kitchens in New York during his long reign there, and it is organised like a professional reference rather than a household book: fillings, sauces and doughs are numbered and recombined, so a single pastry shell such as No. 161 serves partridge, marrow, tongue or sweetbread as the larder allows. Rissole is an old word, medieval in origin -- the French verb rissoler, to brown, derives from it rather than the other way about -- and the form is older still: a fried turnover of chopped cooked meat in a wrapper of pastry. What marks these two as late-nineteenth-century restaurant food is the machinery behind them: scarlet tongue, a nitre-cured luxury of the charcuterie counter, and braised sweetbreads pressed flat under a weight, both bound in the mother sauces that Careme's generation had codified and that Ranhofer expected any cook in his brigade to have standing ready on the stove.