Take 1 cup of boiled rice and mix with 3 beaten eggs. Then sift ½ cup of flour with 1 teaspoonful of baking-powder and a pinch of salt. Add some sugar to taste. Beat to a light thick batter and fry a spoonful at a time in boiling lard. Sprinkle with pulverized sugar and serve hot with cooked fruit.
A thrifty fritter built on leftover rice, of the kind that appears in nearly every daily-dish calendar cookbook of the period. The batter is stiff rather than pourable, and that is intentional.
- The hinge: cold, dry riceUse rice that has been boiled, drained and cooled; leftover rice works well. The original does not specify, but warm or wet rice will slacken the mixture and make it harder to hold a spoon shape in the fat.
- "Boiling lard"Deep fat at 360-375F. Lard is still the closest thing to the original; any neutral oil with a high smoke point works. About 2 inches in a heavy pan is enough, and the fat must recover between batches or the fritters absorb it.
- Batter consistencyHalf a cup of flour to a cup of rice and three eggs gives a thick batter that drops from the spoon rather than pours. If it slackens, add flour a spoonful at a time rather than more rice.
- Sugar to tasteThe original leaves this open. One to two tablespoons in the batter is a reasonable amount; more browns the outsides before the centres set. The fritters are also dusted with sugar after frying.
- Pulverized sugarThis is what we call confectioners' or powdered sugar. Period pulverized sugar had no cornstarch in it, and the grading of "powdered" against "pulverized" was inconsistent between suppliers, but the modern product behaves the same on a hot fritter.
- "Cooked fruit"Meaning stewed or compoted fruit, unsweetened or lightly sweetened — apples, plums, apricots, cherries. Served warm and spooned over or beside, not a jam.
- Size and timingA rounded tablespoon per fritter, two to three minutes total, turned once. Drain on paper and dust with sugar while still hot so it clings.
- YieldRoughly two dozen small fritters at a rounded tablespoon each, serving four or so as a dessert or breakfast dish. They do not hold; fry and serve in batches.
Rice fritters of this type belong to a wide European family of leftover-rice sweets — the Italian frittelle di riso, the French beignets de riz, and similar fried rice cakes in Dutch home cooking — all of them ways of turning yesterday's boiled rice into something worth putting on the table. Rice was a familiar and relatively cheap pantry item in the Netherlands by the nineteenth century, which is why sweet rice puddings and fried rice cakes are so firmly domestic there. The book this appears in is a calendar cookbook: one dish for each day of the year, each tagged with a nationality, a format found in American household publishing around the turn of the twentieth century, when foreign cooking was promoted as a source of variety and economy at once. Whether any particular Dutch cook would have recognised the attribution is another matter — the national labels in such books are loose.