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Pork, Breast of, with Rice
Wash one pound of best rice, and boil it in a quart of water for five minutes. Drain it, and put it aside. Cut a pound of the breast of pork, fat and lean together, into dice. Fry these in two ounces of butter till they are lightly browned, then add the rice, three pints of stock or water, and a little pepper and salt if required. Simmer all gently for half an hour, and stir the mixture occasionally to keep the rice from burning at the bottom of the saucepan. Serve all together on a hot dish with a pound of fried sausages laid round it. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d., exclusive of the sausages.
A Victorian one-pot of pork and rice, generous in quantity and vague about the rice variety. A few notes make it behave.
- Breast of porkThis is what a modern butcher calls pork belly. Ask for a piece with the skin and rib bones removed, then cut it into roughly half-inch dice so fat and lean render together.
- The riceThe book says only "best rice", and most likely has a long, dry Patna or Carolina grain in mind. Use a plain long-grain rice; basmati works but shortens the cooking, and short-grain or Arborio will collapse into porridge over the full half hour.
- Liquid and the parboilOne pound of rice is about 2⅓ cups, and three pints of stock (60 fl oz) after a five-minute parboil is a lot. Start with about 2 pints and add more as it is absorbed — the finished dish should be moist and loose, not soupy.
- Stirring is the hingeRice, fat and a heavy pan burn readily. Use the widest, heaviest pan you have, keep the heat at a bare simmer, and scrape the bottom every five minutes or so.
- SeasoningThe "if required" assumes a well-salted household stock. With unsalted stock or water the dish needs proper salting from the start; rice absorbs salt as it cooks and will not take it well at the end.
- The sausagesA pound of plain British-style pork sausages, fried separately and laid round the edge. Cook them to 160F/71C in their own pan rather than crowding the rice.
- TimingThe stated three-quarters of an hour covers the five-minute parboil, the frying and the half-hour simmer. Check the rice at 20 minutes rather than trusting the clock.
- YieldA pound of rice, a pound of pork and a pound of sausages will feed six to eight. Halve everything for a family supper.
Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the 1870s for households running on a fixed weekly sum, which is why nearly every entry ends with a "probable cost" a figure that told the reader at a glance whether the dish belonged to her budget. Rice was the cheap bulking starch of the period, imported in quantity from India and Burma and priced well below meat, so a pound of it stretched a pound of pork belly across a large table. Dishes of this shape, fatty meat browned and then simmered with rice in stock, appear across European cookery under many names, and the Victorian English version is generally traced less to any single tradition than to the plain economics of a fuel-saving one-pot supper. The ring of fried sausages is the concession to appearance: it turns a pan of rice into something that can be sent to table on a hot dish.