Cook 1 pint of milk; add ½ cup of boiled rice and some currants; stir in the yolks of 2 eggs well beaten with 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar. Remove from the fire. Add 1 teaspoonful of vanilla; then form into cylinders. Dip in beaten egg and fine bread-crumbs and fry a golden brown. Sprinkle with pulverized sugar and put some red currant jelly on top and serve.
The instructions are compressed to the point of omission — this is a sweet rice croquette, and the whole success of it rests on getting the rice mixture thick enough and cold enough to shape. Read the points below before starting.
- The hinge: it must be cooked down and chilledA pint of milk with half a cup of cooked rice is soup, not a mixture you can roll. Simmer it gently until the rice has absorbed nearly all the milk and the mass pulls away from the spoon, then spread it on a plate and refrigerate at least 3 hours, or overnight, until firm enough to cut. Warm mixture will burst in the fat.
- Adding the yolksBeat the yolks with the sugar, then temper them with a few spoonfuls of the hot rice before stirring them back in over low heat. "Remove from the fire" comes immediately after — the yolks are there to bind, and if the pan returns to a boil they scramble into threads.
- Currants means two different things hereThe currants stirred into the rice are most likely dried Zante currants (small raisins); the recipe says only "some currants." Soak them in warm water 10 minutes so they don't stay leathery. The red currant jelly at the end is the fruit preserve, a common garnish for fried sweets.
- Pulverized sugarConfectioners' or icing sugar. Period "pulverized" sugar was ground finer than granulated and generally lacked the cornstarch found in modern powdered sugar; modern powdered sugar works as a substitute.
- FryingDeep fat at 350–360F. The cylinders are already cooked through, so you are only setting the crust and heating them — 2 to 3 minutes, turning once. Any longer and the interior liquefies and pushes through the coating.
- BreadingDry breadcrumbs, not fresh, and roll the cylinders in flour first if the surface feels damp. A second dip in egg and crumbs is worth the trouble on any croquette holding a soft filling.
- VanillaOne teaspoon of extract is right by modern standards. If you have a vanilla bean, split it into the milk at the start.
- YieldRoughly eight croquettes of finger length — four servings as a dessert. Serve them hot; they are unpleasant cold.
Sweet fried rice croquettes are a fixture of Belgian and northern French cookery, where croquettes de riz sit alongside the savoury shrimp and cheese croquettes that Belgium is better known for: rice cooked to a stiff pudding with milk, sugar and egg yolk, chilled, breaded and dropped in fat. The technique is the same one behind Italian arancini and the old English "rice fritter," and it belongs to an era when leftover rice pudding was a resource rather than a leftover. Books like this one, which assigned a dish to every day of the year and a nationality to every dish, tended to attach national labels loosely — the label here is fair enough, though the recipe as printed assumes the reader already knows how a croquette mixture behaves and so skips the cooking-down and chilling entirely.