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RICE (a la Tremain)
Chop up a medium-sized onion, fry it as dark as possible without burning. Then, after draining the fat off, stir into it half a pint of gravy made from the bones of any cooked game, add half a glass of sherry, a tea-spoonful of black currant jelly, and a small piece of glaze. Simmer for ten minutes, and rub through a hair sieve. Take as much browned rice (see RICE, BROWNED) as will fill a breakfast cup, pile it on to a dish, pour the sauce over, and mix lightly with two forks. Have ready four hard-boiled eggs (plovers' or pheasants' are best), quarter them, and put them round the base. Sprinkle the top with small dice-shaped croutons, and serve as a savoury. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A late-Victorian savoury: a small, sharply flavoured dish served at the end of dinner rather than as a main course. Most of the work is in the sauce, which is essentially a game espagnole reduced to a spoonable coating.
- The hinge: fry the onion dark, not blackThe whole colour and depth of the sauce comes from that onion taken well past golden to a deep mahogany. Go one shade too far and the bitterness carries straight through the sherry and jelly, and there is no rescuing it.
- Half a pint of gravyImperial measure, so 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups). The recipe means stock made from the bones of any cooked game, simmered and strained — not thickened gravy. A strong brown chicken or duck stock is the nearest everyday substitute.
- "Half a glass of sherry"A Victorian wine glass held roughly 2 to 2½ fl oz, so read this as about 1 fl oz. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso; cream sherry will push the sauce sweet once the jelly is in.
- A small piece of glazeGlace de viande — stock reduced to a sticky, near-solid concentrate. A teaspoon of it is enough. Commercial demi-glace or a good stock reduction does the same job of giving body without flour.
- Black currant jellyThe tart-sweet fruit jelly served with game, here dissolved into the sauce rather than alongside. Redcurrant jelly is the usual modern stand-in, though it is milder and sweeter.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; hair was preferred to metal, which was said to taint acidic sauces. A fine-mesh strainer or chinois is the equivalent; press the onion through rather than discarding it, since it is the body of the sauce.
- Browned riceThe book cross-refers to a separate entry; browned rice is rice toasted to a nut-brown before it is cooked. Toasting the dry grains in a pan until they smell like popcorn, then cooking as usual, gets you there.
- Plovers' eggsLapwing and other plover eggs were a luxury of the period and are now illegal to take in Britain and elsewhere under wild bird protection law. Quail eggs give the same scale and quartered hen eggs the same effect.
- Yield and serviceNo yield is given; a breakfast cup of rice with four quartered eggs round the base makes a small savoury course for a few people. Add the croutons at the last moment or they soften into the sauce.
The savoury course — something small, hot and salty served after the sweet and before the dessert fruit — was a peculiarly British institution of the later nineteenth century, and Cassell's devotes a good many entries to it. Dishes of this kind often drew on what the kitchen already had: here, the bones of yesterday's game, a spoonful of the jelly from its service, and the tail of a bottle of sherry, all bound together over rice. The "à la" name follows the period's habit of dressing English household cookery in French-sounding titles; Tremain is more likely a household or a proprietor's name than any documented chef, and Cassell's gives no attribution. What the recipe does record is a game-larder economy in which plovers' and pheasants' eggs could be treated as an ordinary garnish, long before wild bird eggs became protected rather than provisioned.