SC - cuskynoles

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Kathleen M Everitt wrote:

> Many years ago I made a dessert called a rissole, from
> Heaven only knows which cookbook and it was more like a doughnut. Dough
> with spices and currants, deep-fried. Delicious, BTW, but only really
> good fresh out of the oil, so I never made them for the event that I was
> trying them out for. Anyway, what does "rissole" mean that it can be
> either a doughnut or a ravioli?

>From Webster's New World of the American Language, that being the first
one I laid hands upon:

"ris-sole   (ris' ol; Fr. re' sol'), n. [Fr.; ult. < LL. russeolus,
reddish < L. russus, red], a small ball or roll of minced meat or fish
mixed with bread crumbs, egg, etc., enclosed in a thin pastry and
fried."

By extension, any breaded, fried ball of cooked meat, such as what
Americans call croquettes, is a rissole. (What the French call a
croquette is a somewhat different critter.)

By further extension, just about any round, formed fritter, as opposed
to those fritters that are poured as batter and therefore free-form, is
a rissole.

Or, putting it another way, lemme ask you this: were these alleged ;  )
doughnuts russet-colored when fried? Q.E.D.! Actually, this may be one
of those situations where the original dish (the original of the one you
cooked, that is) was a ball of thick batter with a ball of fruit filling
inside. Some no-goodnik may have decided that his simplification of that
recipe was an improvement, as in the case of the pierogen in one of the
Jeff Smith books, where the cheese filling is mixed right in with the
dough ingredients, and what are more or less gnocchi, made out of them.
> 
> Is there a URL for OED? Our library doesn't have one and I can't afford
> one!

There is a Web page for the OED, but I don't have the URL offhand. I
believe you have to subscribe to use the service (as in financial
outlay), but there used to be a limited trial usage session avaiable.
This may have changed, as I haven't looked at it for a while.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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