Rice Balls
1 teaspoon finely chopped parsley. 1 egg slightly beaten.
Salt, pepper, cayenne.
PROCESS: Warm rice slightly and rub through a sieve, add flour, seasonings, and bind together with egg. Measure mixture by the teaspoonful. Roll in small balls. Poach until firm on outside in boiling salted water. Remove with skimmer and drop into clear, hot soup.
Fifth Sunday
A soup garnish rather than a dish in itself: small rice dumplings poached in salted water and dropped into clear broth at the last moment. Note that the ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the quantities of cooked rice and flour have been lost with the page break, so you are working from proportions rather than measurements.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the parsley, egg and seasonings survive in this excerpt. For a workable ratio, a cup of soft-cooked rice sieved with two or three tablespoons of flour and one egg gives a paste that just holds a ball; add flour a spoonful at a time until it stops sticking to the hands.
- Rub through a sieveThis is the hinge. The rice must be pressed through a sieve while still warm so it breaks down into a smooth paste — whole grains will not bind and the balls fall apart in the poaching water. A potato ricer or the back of a ladle against a coarse strainer does the work faster than a spoon.
- "Poach until firm on outside"Two to three minutes in barely boiling water is enough. The balls are meant to finish in the soup, so overcooking here leaves them waterlogged and pasty.
- Keep the water at a shiverA hard rolling boil knocks small dumplings apart. Salt the water well and hold it just below a full boil, and lift the balls out with a slotted spoon the moment they firm and rise.
- CayenneIn a book of this period the amount intended is a few grains rather than a modern quarter-teaspoon; the heat should barely register against the broth.
- Yield and servingTeaspoon-sized portions from a cup of rice give several dozen small balls; count on four to six per bowl of consomme, added to the hot soup shortly before serving.
- Making aheadThey can be poached an hour or two in advance, spread on an oiled plate so they do not fuse, then warmed through in the soup.
Rice balls of this kind belong to the long European tradition of soup garnishes — the German Einlage, the French quenelle and royale — meant to give a clear consomme something to hold without clouding it. A book like 52 Sunday Dinners, which lays out a full menu for each Sunday of the year, needed a first course that looked deliberate and cost almost nothing, and a garnish built from leftover boiled rice met both requirements. Forcing cooked starch through a sieve before binding it with egg was a familiar technique in American cookery-school writing of the period; the same method underlies the potato croquettes and farina dumplings that appear elsewhere in books of this generation.