On Rissóis

Fried dough dishes are a universal constant; almost all, if not all cultures have some kind of fried dough dish in their cuisine that they know and love to eat. Sweet or savory, it’s a pleasure to indulge — from samosas to bomboloni, empanadas to malasadas, they’re everywhere you look. Now combine that with a shrimp dish, like a dumpling. Shrimp encased in dough is not as universal as fried dough, but it’s still widely devoured: think har gow, shrimp wontons, or rissóis.

Rissóis, pronounced “ree-soy-ge” with a soft ‘g’ sound, is a Portuguese dish of fried shrimp dumplings. The best of both worlds of shrimp dishes and fried dough, rissóis presents a deceptively simple concept: a shrimp mixture enclosed in a half moon of dough, dredged in flour and egg, covered in breadcrumbs, and fried to golden brown perfection in oil. After all, how difficult could it be to put a shrimp filling in some dough circles with a cookie cutter? The answer is: more difficult than you might expect — I’ve seen the process stretch over two days in some cases. 

Now, this year calls for another step in the routine of making the rissóis, one that involves multiplication, addition, and division. And all of it just for me. Type 1 Diabetes is a curse of math, calculating carbohydrates per serving size of each ingredient, multiplying that into what actually gets used in a recipe, adding all of it together, and dividing that into probable servings to work out how much I can eat without having to give myself a dose of insulin that’ll burn going in. Meat, thankfully, has no carbohydrates to be found, enabling a voraciously carnivorous diet and meaning I won’t have to worry about the shrimp in the rissóis equation. My varied ratios of units of insulin per gram of carbohydrates put me in the middle of the world’s worst math problem, painstakingly calculating ahead of time to determine what I’ll need to do to get the maximum enjoyment out of the food I want. As if my world hadn’t changed enough around the holidays, 2022 had to throw me this curveball to contend with.

The production scene was a familiar one repeated over the years: my Avó (pronounced Av-ah), my maternal grandmother, would be working in the kitchen with my mom while my dad did some work on his computer or watched hockey, and my brother and I played Pokémon and watched any Rankin Bass movie on ABC Family. This was back in the days when Freeform was still ABC Family, and the 25 Days of Christmas even had a folding guide we could grab from the Stanford Shopping Center, where we’ve been taking our Christmas photos with Santa for years. Sometimes the sounds of the movies would be drowned under the whir of our old red blender tearing up the shrimp. And the decorated tree would wait in the corner, colored lights turned on if it was overcast or dark outside, gifts accumulating below it on the tree skirt. In the kitchen, my tiny grandmother held the reins of the operation tightly. My mom says she was always like that, just like my mom is, and just like I might be. You may be allowed to assist in the kitchen, but your every action will be supervised and scrutinized, and you must never forget that you are in her kingdom.

There are photos of my brother and I as toddlers ‘helping’ our mom and Avó with assembling the rissóis, but in reality they were moving our tiny hands to fold the scalloped-edge dough around the carefully portioned dollops of filling. Per my Avó’s strict oversight, I can still remember growing up and using two teaspoons to form the perfect ball of shrimp filling scraped cool out of a pot.  Not too much, you don’t want the rissóis to burst in the frying oil – a process we were only allowed near recently – but not too little, we don’t want to have filling left over and an almost hollow rissóis. Sometimes it’s hard to scrape the filling out of the pot without taking way too much, between it being cooled in the fridge after cooking and having to navigate between chunks of shrimp, but the taste always makes it worth the while.

The dough is always made after the shrimp are cooked, because an integral part of the dough recipe is the stock leftover from cooking the shrimp. Three slips of lemon peel join the flour and shrimp stock mix, complementing the lemon juice in the filling. Once the dough, still steaming from being mixed over a burner, is ready, the ball gets transferred to the marble slab we lug out onto the kitchen table, coated in flour and covered with a metal bowl. It’s supposed to stay a little tacky after handling, so we can’t use too much flour on the marble or we run the risk of making the dough too stiff. It gets rolled and shoved around the whole slab, occasionally stuffed back under the bowl while the slab gets re-floured, and we all have to hunt down the lemon peel in order to gently pick it out. Sometimes it gets shoved back under the bowl because it’s still too hot, even for my mother’s asbestos hands.

Once the dough is deemed ready, it gets rolled out on the slab, and the pot of filling is removed from the fridge so we can scoop it and put it in the divots my mom and Avó meticulously select. Not too close, and not too many, you have to take the process a couple rissóis at a time. It goes as follows: roll out the dough, drop some filling, use the scalloped-edge cookie cutter to make a circle, fold it into a half-moon and crimp the edge shut, place it on a sheet pan for breading and frying, and roll up the dough into a ball. Repeat until there’s no more dough or filling left.  Ideally, the filling runs out first — so you can use the last bits of dough to fry little pieces to snack on after.

Now, thankfully, this whole recipe is written down in a notebook with all the other recipes from my Avó, but some elements require intuiting, such as whether the dough needs more flour or stock, or if the filling needs to have more lemon or seasoning. For my Avó, it was all instinctual with decades of cooking under her belt. When she stopped being able to visit from Montreal, and eventually passed away, it was up to my mom and I to experiment with little elements to make it taste like it always did.

I miss my Avó, the tiny Portuguese widow who traveled to so many countries by cruise and by tour – usually with my uncle, her eldest son – who would play virtual solitaire on a handheld console if she wasn’t knitting or watching Friends, and who would organize making the Bolos de Tia Anica cookies if she was visiting. The recipes are all written down, and although she didn’t fly from Montreal every year, she was here enough to leave a gap, not a hole, that feels a little sharper with the holidays.  

It took us multiple years alone to get the dough recipe to be exactly as it used to be — just the right amount of tacky without sticking all over the place and making a mess that had to be over-kneaded to be usable. One year, the rissóis filling was just a bit too lemony, fueling an ongoing joke between my parents where my dad insists that my mom is too heavy-handed with lemon and my mom denies it. Thankfully, we all agreed that we needed to reduce the lemon next time around. That’s not to say any of the experimental batches were bad, not at all, the taste was just slightly different from how we remembered it being. But we’ve finally got it down pat with all our notes to help.  

With all of this in mind, it’s no wonder we only make rissóis for Christmas and New Year’s; it’s a monumental effort that turns out sheet pan after sheet pan of rissóis that we meticulously divide between the four of us. Bring it on, I say. I’ll eat them freshly fried and cooled, I’ll eat them cold from the fridge, I’ll eat them reheated in the oven — just as long as I can scarf down some rissóis, I don’t care how! There’s no amount of math that can turn me off of them! And sure, I can buy some ludicrously overpriced rissóis at Adega downtown, or I can make the trek to San Francisco’s Uma Casa to order some there, but when you can make them in the comfort of your own home, with your family, isn’t that the better experience?

Samantha Denny is studying for her MFA in Creative Writing at San José State University and has been working for San José State’s Reed Magazine for three issues now.  She’s been published in SJSU’s Meatspace Magazine and by the Poets and Writers Coalition, and when she isn’t writing, she’s coaching swim team for her local club.