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CASSEROLE OF RICE (French method)
Wash one pound of the best Carolina rice in two or three waters. Drain it, and put it into a stewpan with a quart of water, a large onion, a tea-spoonful of salt, and two ounces of fat. The skimmings of saucepans will answer for this purpose, or fat bacon, but if these are not at hand, use butter. Simmer very gently till the rice is quite soft but whole. Then drain it, and pound it to a paste. Well butter a baking dish or casserole mould, and press the paste into it. Mark the top in the same way as a cover of paste, making the marks rather deep. Pour a little butter over the whole, let it get cold, then turn it out of the mould, and bake it in a very hot oven till it is brightly browned, but not hard. The oven can scarcely be too hot for it. Take off the marked cover about an inch in depth. Scoop out the middle, and fill it with whatever is prepared for it. This may consist of mincemeat, Irish stew, rechauffe curries, hashes, or macaroni. Pour in a suitable sauce, replace the cover, and before serving return it to the oven for a few minutes. Time to boil the rice, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the mincemeat, 6d. Sufficient for six persons.
This is not a baked casserole in the modern sense but a moulded rice case — a crust you build, chill, bake hard and then hollow out to hold a filling. Read it as a container recipe and everything falls into place.
- The hinge: chill it completelyThe rice paste has to go stone cold in the mould before you turn it out, or the case will slump the moment it hits the heat. Several hours in the refrigerator, or overnight, is not too long.
- "Casserole" means the mouldIn this period a casserole was the vessel — here a plain deep dish or charlotte mould that the rice is pressed into and turned out of. Any large straight-sided ovenproof bowl works; butter it heavily and it will release.
- Very hot ovenTake "the oven can scarcely be too hot" as 450–500F. You want fast surface colour without drying the case through, so watch it and pull it when it is evenly brown. The recipe gives no baking time.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice from the old South Carolina trade, and in Victorian Britain simply the byword for good quality white rice. Any long-grain white rice stands in; avoid parboiled or basmati, which resist breaking down into paste.
- Cooking the rice deliberately softThree-quarters of an hour is longer than rice normally needs — that is the point. The grains must be soft enough to mash while still holding shape, as the recipe's "quite soft but whole" says. The recipe does not say what becomes of the large onion; it can be lifted out before pounding.
- "Skimmings of saucepans"Fat skimmed off stocks and stews and saved, the standard thrift fat of a Victorian kitchen. Two ounces is about a quarter cup; bacon fat or butter is what most cooks will reach for now.
- Pound by hand, not by machineA potato masher or the back of a wooden spoon gives a stiff, cohesive paste. A food processor can overwork the starch into a gluey texture.
- "Mincemeat" and "rechauffé"Mincemeat here is minced cooked meat, not the sweet fruit mixture, and rechauffé means reheated leftovers. The filling should be fully hot and well sauced before it goes in, since the final return to the oven is only a few minutes.
- YieldSix, as the original states, served as a single centrepiece that is cut or spooned at table.
Rice cases of this kind belong to a wider nineteenth-century family of edible containers — vol-au-vents, croustades, timbales, borders of rice or potato — in which a starch shell replaced or imitated pastry, and the whole point was to present reheated food as a new dish. The English kitchen picked the idea up from French practice, which is why the recipe is labelled "French method"; the word casserole still meant the pan or mould rather than its contents, and the modern American sense of a one-dish bake came later. The list of fillings — Irish stew, hashes, warmed-over curries, macaroni — shows what the recipe is really for: a respectable way to bring yesterday's meat back to the table in a large household where nothing was thrown out. The call for "the best Carolina rice" reflects the reputation that Carolina long-grain held in British markets through the nineteenth century, and the airy suggestion that saucepan skimmings will do for the fat places the dish firmly in the economical end of the book.