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Rissolettes Russe
Prepare a noodle paste as follows: Spread half pound sifted flour on a corner of the table, make a small hole in the centre. Crack into it three whole eggs; add a saltspoon salt, a tablespoon cold milk. Mix well with the hand until a very thick paste, which will take about ten minutes. Let rest for five minutes on a lightly floured table. Then roll it out three times its original size and let rest for five minutes. Roll it out to the thickness of a fifty-cent piece and let rest again five minutes. Then with a pastry cutter two inches in diameter cut as many pieces as possible, and with a beaten-up egg gently wet the edges of each piece all around. Neatly lay half teaspoon Russian caviare in the centre of each piece, fold them up in two; lightly steep them in beaten-up egg, roll in bread crumbs and fry in boiling fat until they have obtained a golden colour. Drain well. Dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is fresh pasta dough used as a fritter wrapper — closer to a fried ravioli than to a pastry rissole. The dough work is straightforward; the timing at the fryer is what decides the dish.
- The hinge: fry fast and brieflyCaviar is cured, not raw, and its texture collapses with sustained heat. The recipe gives no temperature or time: hot fat and a short immersion, just long enough for the thin dough to colour, and no longer.
- Half pound of flourRoughly 1 3/4 cups by modern measure, though weighing is better here. With three eggs and a tablespoon of milk it makes a stiff dough; expect to work it hard for the full ten minutes.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. The caviar brings most of the seasoning, so do not increase it.
- Thickness of a fifty-cent pieceRoughly 2 mm, a scant 1/16 inch: thin, but not sheer.
- Why the three restsEach five-minute pause lets the gluten relax so the sheet stops springing back. Skipping them means a dough that fights the pin and shrinks after cutting.
- SealingEgg-wash the full rim, press out all air as you fold, and crimp firmly. A trapped pocket of air or a weak seam will burst in the fat and the caviar is lost.
- Caviar quantityHalf a teaspoon in each round; the total depends on how many rounds the sheet yields, but runs to a few ounces. Any firm-grained roe works.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield; a half-pound of flour rolled this thin and cut in two-inch rounds makes a good many pieces. The folded napkin on the platter is a period device for absorbing fat — a rack and paper does the same job before plating.
A rissole is an old French preparation — the name is generally traced to the same root as roussir, to brown — in which a filling is enclosed in dough and fried; rissolette is simply the small version, and à la russe covered a range of Russian associations on turn-of-the-century menus, here signalling that caviar is involved. Recipes of this kind belong to the grand-restaurant repertoire that American cookbooks of the 1900s borrowed wholesale from Paris kitchens, where sturgeon roe from the Caspian was expensive but far from unobtainable, and where a chef thought nothing of burying it inside a fritter. The choice of a noodle paste rather than a puff or short pastry is the interesting detail: an egg-rich dough rolled thin fries crisp without the greasiness of laminated pastry, and it points to the same logic that produces fried ravioli in Italian cooking.