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CASSEROLE OF RICE (English method)
Wash a pound of the best rice in two or three waters, and boil it very gently until it is quite tender but whole. Drain it and beat it well. If for a sweet casserole, use milk, sugar, a little butter, and lemon or other flavouring. If intended for meat or fish, stew the rice with water and fat, and season it with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. When quite cool, put a bordering about three inches high and three wide round the edge of a shallow dish, brush it over with egg or clarified butter, and set it in the oven to brown. Then place in the middle the stew, curry, or sweets which are prepared for it. Time to boil the rice, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the interior. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The word "casserole" here means the rice itself — a moulded wall of cooked rice that acts as an edible case for a stew, curry or sweet filling. Nothing is baked in a covered dish, and the interior is cooked separately.
- The hinge: the rice must be stickyA three-inch wall will only stand if the grains are broken down and glutinous. Use a short-grain pudding or risotto rice cooked slack and soft, then mash it hard, as the recipe's "beat it well" instructs. Long-grain or basmati is much less likely to hold a shape.
- Three-quarters of an hourThe recipe asks for rice "quite tender but whole", with the breaking down done afterwards by beating; the long timing reflects the rice of the period. Modern short-grain rice will usually be soft enough in 25 to 30 minutes with plenty of liquid; judge by texture, not the clock, and stop before it scorches.
- "Two or three waters"Rinsing until the water runs clear removes surface starch, which is what you want for separate grains and not what you want here. One brief rinse to clean the rice is enough; leave the starch.
- Building the borderWork with the rice cool but not fridge-cold, on a shallow buttered ovenproof dish. Press it into a wall with wet hands or a palette knife, or pipe it from a large plain nozzle. Three inches wide is generous for a modern table; two is easier to manage and still stable.
- Browning the caseBrush with beaten egg or clarified butter and set it in a hot oven; the recipe gives no temperature, but around 425F for 10 to 15 minutes is a reasonable modern reading, until the surface is set and patched with gold. The point is colour on the outside while the inside stays soft. A blowtorch or a few minutes under a broiler does much the same job.
- Seasoning the two versionsThe sweet version is essentially a rice pudding stiff enough to stand: cook in milk with sugar, butter and lemon, the recipe allowing "lemon or other flavouring". The savoury version wants water and fat — butter or dripping — with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Season it more assertively than seems right; a bland border flattens whatever sits inside it.
- Assembly and timingFill only at the moment of serving. A hot, wet stew or curry standing in the case will soften the wall from the inside within a few minutes.
- YieldA pound of raw rice makes a border for five or six, as stated, and the filling is costed separately — the original's 6d. is for the rice alone.
Rice borders of this kind were, by most accounts, common in Victorian and Edwardian service, the English cousin of the French bordure de riz, in which a moulded ring of starch — rice, semolina, mashed potato, or a forcemeat — framed a ragoût, a curry or a compote and turned a plain stew into something presentable at table. A casserole in nineteenth-century professional kitchens meant a stewpan, from the French casserole (from casse, pan or ladle), with the sense of an edible case an extension of that vessel sense, long before the word settled in English on the baked dish and eventually on its contents. Cassell's marks this an "English method", and the plainness is the point: the border is a vehicle, cheap at sixpence, for stretching a small amount of curried meat or fish across six plates. Something of the technique is often said to persist in the piped potato or duchesse border, and the taste for rice as architecture rather than as a loose accompaniment is one of the clearer markers of how differently these cooks thought about a plate.