No. 958

Rissolettes a la Solferino

Cut some foies-gras, truffles, mushrooms, quenelles and sweetbreads into small three-sixteenth inch squares; put this salpicon into a well-reduced allemande sauce (No. 407), and when cold make the rissolettes with this salpicon, the same as for a la pompadour (No. 956).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A compact entry in Ranhofer's shorthand style: the whole recipe is a filling, and the actual assembly is farmed out to another number in the book. Everything below assumes you have that cross-reference in hand.

The recipe is incomplete on its ownNo. 958 gives only the salpicon. The wrapping, shaping and cooking come from No. 956, Rissolettes a la Pompadour, and the sauce from No. 407. Without those two numbers you have a bowl of filling and no dish.
SalpiconA salpicon is simply a mixture of ingredients cut to uniform small dice and bound with a thick sauce. Three-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm, and the evenness matters more than the exact figure: the filling should read as a mosaic, not a paste.
Allemande sauceA veloute finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison, largely retired from modern menus and absorbed into the veloute family. "Well-reduced" is the operative phrase here, and it is the hinge of the recipe. The binding sauce must be stiff enough to set solid when cold, or the filling will burst the casing in the fat.
Chill before shaping"When cold" is not optional. The salpicon should be refrigerated until firm, ideally several hours, so it can be portioned and enclosed cleanly. Warm filling makes soft, leaking rissolettes.
Foies-grasRanhofer means cooked whole foie gras or a foie gras preparation, diced, not a mousse. Note that foie gras production and sale are restricted in some jurisdictions; a good chicken-liver parfait, well chilled and diced, behaves similarly in a bound salpicon.
SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads must be soaked, blanched, pressed and trimmed before dicing. Order them ahead; they are a special-order item at most butchers now.
QuenellesSmall poached forcemeat dumplings, usually veal or chicken, made separately and then cut down to the same dice as everything else. In a modern kitchen a firm chicken mousseline, poached in a shallow tray and cubed, gives the same result with less fuss.
Truffles and mushroomsThis recipe calls for truffle cut into the same small dice as everything else, not shaved. Given current prices, a small quantity of truffle with well-reduced sauteed cremini carries most of the effect; truffle oil does not.
YieldNone is given here; Ranhofer frequently omits it. Rissolettes were served as a hot side dish, several small pieces per person; count on three to four per guest and scale the salpicon accordingly.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the cooking of Delmonico's in New York, and its numbered, cross-referenced structure is that of a professional kitchen manual rather than a home cookbook: a chef who already knows how to make allemande sauce needs only to be told which garnish goes inside. The name follows the nineteenth-century French habit of christening garnishes after battles and public figures; Solferino was the bloody Franco-Sardinian victory over Austria in June 1859, and the word attached itself to a color, a Paris street, and a run of dishes on Second Empire menus. A rissolette is a diminutive rissole, and the family of filled, fried pastries it belongs to runs back through medieval European cookery. The filling here, foie gras, truffles, sweetbreads and quenelles, is a fair index of what Delmonico's considered ordinary luxury in the 1890s, and only the last is easy to reproduce cheaply today.