Chapter 5
Fannie Farmer Sexes up Her Food: Was She Really the “Mother of Level Measurements”?
The Boston Cooking School at 174 Tremont Street had four kitchens and a staff of ten teachers, the students being either young women planning to marry or older women running their own homes. There was also a big draw from cooks in private homes—there were often over one hundred career cooks each week in these demonstrations. You could take how-to-shop courses, including visits to Faneuil Hall, and there was a crash course—daily lessons for a month—for folks who wanted to get up to speed fast. For the most part, these classes were designed for a family of six with no more than one servant; the recipes were, at least in the beginner’s classes, easy to follow. Farmer knew her audience and packaged courses to suit their needs.
A friend of ours, Bob Brooks, had a grandmother, Mary Brooks, who came to Boston from County Galway in 1910 and then took courses from Fannie herself at her new school. According to her diary, the tuition was $125, a huge sum for that time, but there were just eight students and these private classes were held one day per week in the mornings, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Fannie also gave two weekly demonstration classes, one for homemakers and one for professional cooks, which attracted audiences of between one hundred and two hundred students. She often employed a screen around the teaching platform to conceal the fact that she was teaching from a seated position. According to the diary, “Fannie Farmer . . . was confined to a wheelchair for more than seven years,” and died while Mary was still a student there. Mary always regretted that Miss Farmer died before she learned to make candy. An odd requiem for the departed.
We know a great deal about Fannie’s original set of courses, since they were printed in her Original 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Farmer offered three sets of cooking courses as a promotional gambit from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. for the plain cooking (evidently what Mary Brooks had signed up for), and at 2:00 p.m. on Friday for the second and third course of instruction.
She began with how to manage the fire (the school did have gas stoves as well, but one assumes that most of her students were still dealing with coal). The plain-cooking basics include the obvious choices: bread baking, mashed and boiled potatoes, soup stock, boiled eggs, beef stew, frying fish and potatoes, apple pie, roast beef, macaroni, and plain lobster. Other staples of nineteenth-century cooking were included as well: clarifying fat, bread pudding, Indian pudding, hoe cake, and wine jelly. Of more interest, although rather mundane, are the following items, since they paint a good picture of the everyday late Victorian menu: water bread (stale bread dipped in water and buttered), blanc mange (a very plain milk-based pudding made with Irish moss, a thickener made from seaweed), and snow pudding (gelatin, water, and sugar with beaten egg whites, usually served with a boiled custard). This penchant for puddings was clearly middle-class English in origin. Even today, on many menus in London restaurants, the dessert section is usually labeled “Puddings.”
The “richer-cooking” courses covered an odd mix of items from French (Charlotte Russe and Lyonnaise Potatoes) to English (Stuffed Leg of Mutton) to classic American (Parker House Rolls, Chicken Croquettes, Cream Pies) to a few rather odd choices, including Curried Lobster and Apple Snowballs. Finally, the “fancy-cooking” classes were where the recipe names became longer, the food felt continental, and Fannie started to pull out all the stops. In the French classics department, one got Veal Birds, Potage à la Reine, Vol-au-Vent, Gâteau St. Honoré, Birds in Potato Cases, macaroons, floating island, Bombe Glacée, Sweetbreads with Peas, and Gâteau de Princesse Louise. But, look out—you also got Pigs in Blankets and Cabinet Pudding (a molded mishmash of gelatin-thickened custard, lady fingers, and macaroons, served with a cream sauce and candied cherries). This seemed as if middle-class suburban Boston women were trying to be sophisticated without having spent any time eating the food on location, in Paris, for example. If that sounds a tad condescending, well, Boston was still rather provincial in 1896, and Fannie’s cooking classes reflected that limitation.
Fannie also understood that home cooks wanted impressive food, restaurant food, continental food—anything that she could dress up, sex up, rename, or make tantalizing. She knew that the larger audience were middle-class and upper-middle-class women who had sufficient time and income to make their dinner table a place of distant locales, of experimentation, of the new and progressive. This meant puff paste, lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska, and any recipe with the word Delmonico or Reine in it, rather than Boston baked beans and gingerbread. It is quite telling, however, that Fannie could teach the basics of making a cake at one moment while in the next she might be explaining the finer points of preparing charlotte russe. If anyone needs confirmation of America as the ultimate melting pot or Fannie’s keen ability to give her students whatever the hell they would pay for, this was it.
When Fannie got too cute with her food, she ran into culinary trouble. Butterfly Tea was a puff paste cookie in the shape of a butterfly and decorated with chopped nuts, glacéed cherries, angelica, cinnamon, and sugar. Russian Eggs were boiled, peeled, set into puff paste cases, and then covered with a creamed mushroom sauce. A Valentine’s Day menu was pink and white: Lover’s Sandwiches (salmon) and the Heart’s-Ache Pudding, both in the shape of hearts, with an addition of cream cheese-and-olive-stuffed walnut halves for Cupid’s Deceits. For St. Patrick’s Day, she tied popcorn balls with green ribbons, upon which were glued the words “St. Patrick” in letters made of macaroni dyed sauterne green. She was, in some way, a budding Martha Stewart, but lacking the benefit of good taste and sophistication. As Laura Shapiro aptly stated in Perfection Salad,this was “socially ambitious cookery.” Fannie had put “high-class food within the reach of ordinary housekeepers and made up-to-date novelties accessible as well—all in the context of progress.”
This was all going on at the same time that Auguste Escoffier was doing the exact opposite, trimming back the excess frivolity of classic French cooking to focus on the foundations of a higher, more refined culinary experience; everything on the plate must serve the purpose of good taste and good sense without elaborate garnishes and unnecessary complexity. Just for a moment, consider the level of culinary training the best chefs acquired in France, compared to the handful of years Fannie spent as a student at the Boston Cooking School. Escoffier had served a six-year apprenticeship starting at age twelve at his uncle’s restaurant in Nice and then worked five years at Le Petit Moulin in Paris. After a stint in the army, he returned to Le Petit Moulin, and then was asked by César Ritz to become chef at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, a partnership that was to become instrumental in the development of his career. They took over the Savoy Hotel in London in 1889, opened a hotel in the Place Vendôme in Paris in 1896, and then the Carlton Hotel in London in 1896. There was simply no comparison between the culinary worlds of the United States and France in the 1890s. Fannie Farmer could not have held a candle to Auguste Escoffier.
But the news is not all bad; some of her culinary advice, information, and recipes seem more than reasonable. Fannie stated that a modest 68 degrees Fahrenheit was the proper temperature for bread fermentation. Bone marrow was often used for browning meat, especially when making soups. Beef was supposed to be best when it was from a steer that was four or five years old. (Today’s beef is from animals no more than two years old.) The Victorians let it ripen for two to three weeks in the winter for best flavor. Onion juice was a common flavoring ingredient, one that we often use today. Poultry was roasted with a flour coating, which created a nice crust and helped to keep in the juices. (We tested this recipe, and it actually worked; see page 141.) Several vegetables in a salad ought to be marinated before serving. (This is something that we thought we had discovered in our test kitchen—demonstrating, once again, that there is little that is new in the culinary world.) There were five different types of batters used for frying—Fannie mistakenly thought fried foods were healthy. (Frying was popular, since it could be done on a stovetop without worrying about managing the heat of an oven.) Dissolved gelatin was added to mayonnaise to make it set up when it was used for decorative purposes. All in all, she was a pretty smart cook when it came to the basics, although prone to tarting up the fancier dishes without a deep understanding of the underlying subtlety and technique of the original.
The one claim that is repeated endlessly in books about Fannie Farmer is that she was the “mother of level measurements,” a label that was earned through her devotion to precision. This is the typical one-note tagline that historians love to bandy about. Here is a typical quote: “Her particular innovation was the refinement known as level measurements, which she promoted forcefully with every recipe she published. Previously even the strictest use of measuring implements retained the old notions of a ‘rounded’ spoonful and a ‘heaping’ cupful. . . . To Fannie Farmer, it seemed simpler and more rational to dispense with the imagery entirely and call a tablespoonful a level tablespoon, using a knife to level the surface after the spoon had been filled.”
Reportedly, the great turning point in Fannie’s cooking career, akin to Newton watching a falling apple, was when she was asked by Maggie Murphy, her cook, to define “butter the size of an egg” as well as “a pinch of salt,” leading to the revelation that precise measurement was the key to culinary perfection. Perhaps if we started with Mary Lincoln’s cookbook, first published in 1883, and then referred to Fannie’s work of 1896, we might finally get to the bottom of this claim.
We need to keep in mind that in Mary Lincoln’s time, the cookware industry was just starting to provide standardized measuring spoons and cups for general home use, the silver teaspoons and tablespoons sold at retail being the accepted units of measure. By 1896, when her cookbook was published, Fannie refers to “tin measuring-cups, divided in quarters or thirds, holding one half-pint, and table spoons of regulation sizes—which may be bought at any store where kitchen furnishings are sold.” So, Fannie had the benefit of a cookware industry that had adopted and advertised more precise, standardized measuring cups and spoons. In a May 1887 edition of Table Talk magazine, Sarah Tyson Rorer comments: “A small tin kitchen cup has recently made its appearance in our market. They are sold in pairs at various prices; one of the pair is divided into quarters and the other into thirds.” In 1894, Mrs. Rorer included measuring spoons and measuring cups in a list of essential kitchen furnishings. So Fannie showed up at just the right time, whereas Mary Lincoln, writing in 1883, was a bit ahead of the cookware industry.
A close examination of Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (I refer to my 1890 edition; the first edition was 1883) reveals a very different story than the one painted by historians. The first observation is that late-nineteenth-century cookbooks often discussed methods or ingredients that were never actually used in the recipes. This is because the world of home cooking was changing so rapidly that the authors felt they had to cover all their bases, from old-fashioned to modern. So, for starters, Mary Lincoln defines an even teaspoonful the same way Fannie did. She did, it is true, include discussions about heaping teaspoons and butter the size of an egg, but she almost never used those measurements in any of her recipes. Her standard units of measurement, the ones found in 99 percent of her recipes, were a “teaspoonful” and a “tablespoonful,” defined as follows: “Dip into the sifted material, and take up a heaping spoonful, shake it slightly until it is just rounded over, or convex in the same proportion as the spoon is round.” Her other definitions for measurements were also precise. She noted that “most cups are smaller at the bottom,” so her rather ingenious method was to fill one cup full of water and then to pour out enough liquid into another, empty cup so that both stood at the same level. That was a half cup. Clearly, she was doing the best anyone could with the tools available to most home cooks. She was also precise when it came to a “scant cupful,” which she defined as “within a quarter of an inch of the top.” Not bad, considering that even modern recipes refer to a “pinch” or a “scant” half cup.
Fannie, to be fair, did remove everything but level measures from her cookbook. She noted in italics, “A tablespoonful is measured level. A teaspoon is measured level.” This is hardly a watershed moment in home cooking, nor is it justification for her moniker, the “mother level of measurements.” This was evolution, not revolution, and Lincoln’s rounded teaspoonfuls were simple enough to use. She was still stuck, as was Mary Lincoln, with measuring spoons that did not have half, quarter, or eighth sizes, so she offered the same solution that Lincoln had used—dividing a tablespoon in half lengthwise for a half, divided once again crosswise for a quarter, and the “quarters crosswise for eighths.” (Cooks in the nineteenth century did not have liquid versus dry measuring cups either. Fannie points out that to measure liquids, “a cupful of liquid is all the cup will hold.”)
Perhaps the most astute comment about the two cookbooks is Laura Shapiro’s observation that “Fannie Farmer did help herself, generously and without acknowledgment, to Mrs. Lincoln’s work; but she stamped the material with her own personality, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she drained it carefully of Mrs. Lincoln’s.”
As for introducing modern cookery, a fresh wind had already been blowing, and its name was Home Economics. At the 1896 Boston Food Fair, Dr. William T. Harris, the U.S. commissioner of education, proposed elevating the home arts, mostly cooking, into a science—one that could be studied, analyzed, perfected, recorded, presented, and taught. So Fannie was part and parcel of a national movement, with less than stellar culinary skills, but a keen sense of marketing, a forceful personality, and a sharp eye for making money and giving the public what it wanted.
FEBRUARY 2009. GIVEN THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE COOK IN the Victorian household and the rather primitive conditions under which she worked, I quickly became intrigued with the details of her life, starting with the details of getting dressed in the early morning. One historical expert, Tames Alan, was particularly useful in describing the lives of household servants, since she regularly provides “living history” lectures on this period and others, dressed in period costume.
In a large private household, the kitchen maid was always the first to rise, cleaning the stove, firing it, scrubbing the floor, making tea, and then bringing a cup to the cook, who might request help in getting dressed. The first article of clothing donned in the morning was a set of split drawers followed by a camisole: cotton in the summer, wool in the winter. The lady of the household, however, wore a one-piece version that was made of silk or extremely fine cotton, so thin that it could pass through her wedding ring, much like a handkerchief. This distinction in the quality of clothing between employer and cook was continued within the household hierarchy: kitchen and housemaids wore even coarser fabrics than the cook. The same inequality was also true between households of different social status: a wealthy family provided better garments for its cook than did one of merely middle-class stature.
Next were the wool stockings, held up by ribbons or, toward the end of the nineteenth century, elasticized garters. The cook would then slip on a petticoat: red flannel in the winter, cotton in the summer. The corset was next, loosely laced and ending above the hips so that the cook would bend easily while working. (Her mistress wore a tightly laced corset to appear as narrow-waisted as possible; a thin cook was never a good sign. Corsets also provided bust support since brassieres were not invented until the 1920s.) The stays were made of a springlike steel, rather than whalebone, another contribution of the Industrial Revolution. One inevitably wonders how one tightened a corset when dressing alone. One clever solution was to install a metal ring on the wall of a servant’s bedroom. The wearer would tie the corset strings to the ring and simply walk away to tighten it.
A cook was likely to wear a corset made of coarse material and therefore a sleeveless corset cover was often slipped on next; this protected the petticoat or dress that rubbed up against it from chafing and wear. The dress was the final piece of clothing; it would still have had a high neckline in the 1890s—no low scoop—and long sleeves that had to be pushed up for cooking. Fabric colors were solid and muted: a light blue or gray, perhaps. The final touches were sensible shoes, perhaps boots, hair pushed into a mobcap or cook’s cap, and a spotless apron. (Women almost never cut their hair and therefore a cap was necessary. In fact, a short-haired cook applying for a job would be regarded with suspicion. A woman had her hair cut for just two reasons: to remove lice or to sell hair for money.) According to a 1904 House Beautiful article, outfits were often changed midafternoon to provide a more formal appearance for the evening.
As the century progressed, however, social equality became the cry of the working class and so the workmen, maids, and cooks often chose clothing that mimicked that of their employers. Harper’s Bazaar noted this trend in 1867, pointing out that crinoline and a flowing train of silk have no place next to a red hot stove or dirty kitchen floor. Instead, they promoted looser, more practical clothing, preferring the flowing blouse of the French workman to the tight-fitting coats and pants often worn by the lower classes in imitation of their masters. This smacked of putting the working class in their place, however, as in this printed admonition: “Let her take the advice of the tasteful, who will tell her that the rude freshness of natural beauty appears to the greatest advantage in a plain setting.”
The pay was modest—a few hundred dollars per year—although cooks in wealthy households were at the high end of the scale and were usually treated well, since a good cook was hard to come by: poaching within one’s social circle was not uncommon. (Cooks had their own menu books—collections of personal recipes—and the mistress of the household would choose among them to create menus.) Life with a middle-class family, however, was often a nightmare; the mistress of the house often had little experience with managing servants, so they were often poorly treated and paid. To get by, then, the cook had her own bag of tricks. When interviewing for employment, she would ask if she could choose the tradesmen. This was crucial, since she often asked purveyors to mark up their prices, paying her the difference. She would also inquire as to the dispensation of the pan drippings and candle ends, both of which could be sold for ready money. On the other hand, servants, including cooks, had their quarterly pay docked if they broke a plate or burned the pudding. In some cases, the servant owed the household money at payday.
As for washing, undergarments, including petticoats, would be laundered either commercially or in-house, but dresses would only be spot-cleaned, since they were usually made of finer, more expensive material and could not withstand constant soap and water. One could purchase “double-motion” hand-cranked washing machines, fashioned from galvanized iron and white cedar tubs. Also for sale were endless designs for racks to dry clothes outside (including one model that attached to a window frame), wash benches, ironing tables, ironing boards, and bosom boards, designed specifically for ironing shirts.
By the early 1900s, however, a private home was often no longer staffed by numerous household servants but reduced to employing just one all-purpose maidservant. In the 1904 The Expert Maid-Servant, the mistress of the household is cautioned that cooking would be just one of the maidservant’s many duties and therefore one had to inquire whether the potential employee understood plain cooking and could follow a simple recipe. “More elaborate accomplishments can rarely be looked for in a maid-of-all-work.” By 1920, after the devastation of the First World War and the influenza epidemic, and the increased availability of factory and other nondomestic jobs, the era of the well-staffed Victorian household was at an end both here and in England.
THE THIRD COURSE WAS TO BE RISSOLES, SMALL FRIED AND filled pastries; this presented the problem of making and rolling out thin sheets of puff pastry. I had never made puff pastry from scratch using the old-fashioned French method, but I was about to get an education.
Rissoles and Boston were perfectly suited for each other, since the original notion was frugality, a kitchen where every scrap was saved, even the water used to boil vegetables. By Fannie Farmer’s era, the de facto rissole was a small puff pastry turnover filled with cooked meat, moistened with a classic French white sauce, and then deep-fried and served on a folded napkin. The term comes from Latin, pasta russeola (later translated as ruissole in Old French; rissoler means “to brown” in modern French as well), which, roughly translated, means “reddish paste.” The fillings were made from just about anything, including peacocks (pheasant, rabbit, and chicken were also offered in descending order of desirability), as one recipe from Apicius, the famous Roman gastronome, attests. Over the centuries, rissoles (sometimes called “rissables” as well) have also been made from fish, lobster, veal, beef, game, tongue, lamb, sweetened fruit, and vegetables.
The puff pastry of Fannie’s day is, of course, a French invention and her nod to being continental, but this sort of rissole was nothing new, a similar recipe having already been offered in The White House Cookbook by Fanny Lemira Gillette. Earlier nineteenth-century versions, however, were nothing more than chopped meat, bound with eggs and bread, then fried in a pan with perhaps a simple bread crumb coating. Over time, the bread crumb variety became known as croquettes.
Rissoles could be dainty, made from puff pastry cut into two-inch squares, or gargantuan, the pastry cut to the size of a dinner plate and folded over a mound of minced meat, fried, and served with a garnish of fried parsley. The fillings could be fashioned from chicken or other poultry, lobster, raw oysters, boiled clams, Indian corn, leftover veal, ham, tongue, lamb, sweet stewed fruit, or mincemeat. Many cooks used lemon zest as a seasoning as well as spices such as cayenne, mace, and nutmeg. Like hash, rissoles were more of an idea than a recipe, one that made good use of whatever happened to be on hand.
Fannie’s recipe did have one unusual aspect. She writes, “Roll in gelatine, fry in deep fat, and drain. Granulated gelatine cannot be used.” I had never heard of using gelatin as a coating for fried foods, but was game to try it. We used the chicken-and-ham combination that she offered as a filling choice, then moistened it with different amounts of béchamel, the “thick white sauce” that she referred to in the recipe. For the gelatin coating, we purchased agar-agar (a dried, tasteless seaweed that was also used in Fannie’s time), rehydrated it, cooled it to room temperature, coated the rissoles, and then fried them up, finding that 360 degrees was just right. To our surprise, the agar-agar coating made the surface blister, and it yielded an extraordinarily crisp coating. This was one of those rare moments when a technique from the foggy culinary past comes back as a true revelation. The filling, however, was bland and creamy, and did not stand up to the wonderful puff pastry on the outside. The moisture in the filling also made it difficult to cook the puff pastry all the way through.
A flavorful chicken-duxelles mixture seemed like a better option. In addition, we thought that cutting out two-inch circles of puff pastry, filling them, and then laying a second circle on top was a better approach than cutting out three-inch circles and folding them over. Our theory was that the folded edge was too thick, making it difficult to cook the pastry all the way through. We also wanted to test using sheet gelatin in place of the agar-agar; we were curious whether frozen rissoles were better than refrigerated in terms of frying and whether a two-step process, similar to the way french fries are cooked, made any sense.
The chicken-duxelles mixture was a winner since it held less moisture and had more flavor, although we thought we could reduce the amount of fat slightly. Adding more chicken also made for a drier, and therefore better, filling. We tried a very thin sheet of puff pastry, just a sixteenth of an inch thick (older recipes speak about “the thickness of a penny”), and this worked a bit better, but the pastry was still not cooking through properly. The sheet gelatin worked pretty much the same as the agar-agar, although both will thicken even at room temperature. Since it is easier to coat rissoles with a liquid than a solid, we used sheet gelatin in a lower concentration.
Chilled rissoles are much better than frozen for frying; the latter sank to the bottom of the pot and one side never cooked properly. The notion of pressing together the circles of puff pastry was indeed better than the “foldover” method, since the folded edge in Fannie’s recipe never cooks through properly. A two-frying method was not necessary.
One other trick: we found that constantly basting the rissoles with the hot oil as they fried made a huge difference—they puffed up immediately and seemed to cook through better. This meant that one could fry only two at a time, but the results were worth it.
As for the remarkable effect of the gelatin, edible coatings were nothing new when applied to fried foods, egg whites being a prime example. The theory is that proteins tend to inhibit oil absorption. The use of gelatin, however, was not part of the culinary repertoire until just before Fannie’s era; the first published example that we were able to find was in 1869. (In addition, gelatin had been used as a preservative. Meat was dipped into hot gelatin, allowed to dry, and then dipped again.) Even today, patents from the 1980s include gelatin used in formulas for frozen pastries. This method promotes a “crisp, unsoggy texture and contributes to mouthfeel.” In our testing, however, the big difference was an immediate blistering effect, the puff pastry exploding like a hooked blowfish, making the rissoles incredibly light and crispy. The result was visually spectacular and was not primarily an issue of absorbing too much oil.
MASTER RECIPE FOR RISSOLES
Yes, this recipe is a lot of work and, yes, you do have to roll out the pastry until it is a mere 1/16 inch thick. Despite these hurdles, this is a fascinating recipe. The little dumplings fry up quickly with a crackly, blistered coating because of the hot oil and gelatin coating—all in all, a spectacular first course. If you want to cheat, just purchase a good-quality frozen puff pastry and the recipe will come out just fine: simply roll it out to a thickness of 1/16 inch and then into 2-inch squares. Proceed with step 3. Our recipe for Homemade Puff Pastry can be found at www.fannieslastsupper.com. In terms of commercial puff, we prefer Dufour Classic Puff Pastry, but Pepperidge Farm also works well.
2½ sheets gelatin
Cool water (for soaking sheets)
1 cup water (for simmering)
1 package frozen puff pastry sheets (or use 1/3 of the Homemade Puff Pastry recipe)
1 recipe filling (see page 68)
2 to 3 quarts frying oil
1. Cover gelatin sheets with cool water to soften, about 5 minutes. Remove, squeeze or drip dry, and add to 1 cup simmering water to dissolve, about 20 seconds. Remove from heat, transfer to small bowl, and let cool to room temperature.
2. Roll puff pastry into a rectangle about ½ inch thick, being careful not to press dough too hard with rolling pin. Cut in half, parallel to the short side. Working one at a time, roll each half gently, flipping and rotating piece until 1/16 inch thick. Square off edges of each half with a sharp knife; cut into 2-inch squares, about 18 per sheet. Keep puff pastry refrigerated as much as possible during this process to keep the butter firm.
3. Working with three rissoles at a time, add 1 teaspoon of either the Chicken Liver filling or Duxelle and Chicken filling (recipes at www.fannieslastsupper.com) or ½ teaspoon of Onion-Cherry Chutney Filling plus 1 pea-sized piece of blue cheese (see recipe on page 68) in center of each cut-out puff. Brush edges lightly with water or gelatin mixture. Top with second piece of puff, pressing air out before completely sealed; press edges to seal. It is important that puff pastry is chilled, and handled as little as possible while assembling; if dough warms up too much, it won’t puff properly when fried. Repeat with remaining puff and filling. Cover tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate.
4. When ready to fry, heat oil to 375 degrees. Check each rissole to make sure that the seal is secure, pinching gently as necessary. Working two at a time, brush with room-temperature gelatin. Gelatin texture should be the consistency of thin egg whites. If it is too firm, microwave for 2 seconds at a time, until correct consistency. Fry two to three at a time, basting each constantly with hot oil until the rissoles turn light golden brown and puff and blister, about 45 to 60 seconds. Flip until cooked through, about 30 to 45 seconds. Remove with slotted spoon, transfer to paper-towel-lined baking sheet and then to wire rack placed in rimmed baking sheet; hold in warm oven while frying remaining rissoles. Season rissoles with salt. Serve.
For the Chicken Liver Filling and the Duxelle and Chicken Filling, go to www.fannieslastsupper.com.
ONION-CHERRY CHUTNEY FILLING WITH BLUE CHEESE
Of the three, this is my favorite filling, since the balance of sweet and pungent marries well with the blue cheese. It knocks your socks off when served in a thin, crisp, hot shell of fried puff.
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1 large onion, diced medium, about 1½ cups
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
1/8 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
¼ teaspoon minced fresh thyme
½ cup dried cherries
½ ounce blue cheese, broken into 12 small pieces the size of peas
1. Heat oil in medium saucepan over medium heat until it begins to shimmer; sauté onion until soft, about 3 to 4 minutes. Add salt, pepper, and sugar and cook until bottom of pot begins to brown, about 6 to 8 minutes, then deglaze with vinegar and cook until pan is dry. Add thyme and cherries and cook until softened and fragrant, about 2 minutes. Remove pan from heat. Transfer mixture to a plate. Refrigerate.
2. Once onion mixture is chilled through, finely chop. Check for seasoning. Refrigerate until ready to use.