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Rissolettes, Moelle
Prepare twelve small rissolettes exactly the same as rissolettes russe but instead of caviare use beef marrow, as follows:
Procure from your butcher about five ounces fresh beef marrow and cut into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Have a saucepan on the fire with a quart boiling water and a teaspoon salt. Carefully slide the marrow into the water and boil for one minute; then shift the pan to the corner of the range and let stand for five minutes. Carefully strain all the water from the pan, without breaking the marrow. Season with one saltspoon salt and a saltspoon cayenne pepper. Chop up very finely together the equivalent of a teaspoon parsley with a sound clove garlic and add to the marrow; add also one tablespoon demi-glace. Carefully mix with a fork without breaking and it will be ready to fill the rissolettes; then proceed.
A filling for small fried or baked pastry cases, built on poached beef marrow. The recipe assumes you already have the rissolettes russe entry in front of you for the pastry, the shaping and the cooking.
- You need the companion recipeThis is a variation, not a standalone dish: the pastry, the shaping and the cooking all come from rissolettes russe (the count of twelve is given here). Read that entry first and treat this page only as the filling.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. A full 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne in five ounces of marrow is aggressively hot by modern palates; start with half and taste.
- Getting the marrowAsk for marrow bones cut into 2-3 inch lengths, or canoe-cut, and push the marrow out whole. Chilling the bones makes the marrow firm enough to slide out and slice cleanly at a quarter inch. Yield varies a good deal with the bones, so buy more than you think you need to reach five ounces.
- The hinge: gentle poachingMarrow collapses into fat the moment it overheats. One minute at a boil, then off the heat for five, is exactly right, and the pan must be moved off the burner rather than merely turned down. "The corner of the range" on a coal stove is the cool zone; on a modern hob, take the pan off entirely.
- Soak the marrow firstNot in the original, but standard practice: an hour or two in cold salted water, refrigerated, draws out blood and gives paler, cleaner slices.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole sauce reduced with brown stock; in modern kitchens usually just a heavily reduced brown stock, thick enough to coat a spoon. A tablespoon of good storebought demi-glace or a heavily reduced beef stock will do; a bouillon cube dissolved in water will not, since the point is body and gloss, not salt.
- MixingA fork, and barely. The slices should stay intact and coated, not become a paste, or the filling will render out and leak through the pastry.
- YieldTwelve small rissolettes, enough for four as a first course or six to eight passed with drinks. Serve hot; the filling is unpleasant once the marrow has cooled and set.
Moelle is simply French for marrow, and its presence here marks the recipe as classical restaurant cooking rather than home cooking: poached marrow was a staple luxury garnish of the late nineteenth-century French kitchen, sliced onto steaks in the bordelaise manner and folded into forcemeats and croustades. Filippini's book, which reflects his years in the Delmonico's kitchens of New York, is organised so that one basic preparation spawns a run of variants -- the same little pastry gets caviar in one entry and marrow in the next -- which is how a professional kitchen tends to think about a repertoire. Marrow was inexpensive and readily had in an era when whole carcasses came into the kitchen, and it largely dropped out of home cooking over the twentieth century.