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RICE (a la Turque)
No. 1.--Wash half a pound of rice in two or three waters. Throw it into a saucepan of boiling water, and boil quickly for five minutes. Drain and dry it. Slice an onion, and fry in hot fat till it is lightly browned. Take it out and fry the rice in the same butter over a gentle fire, turning it about continually to keep it form burning. When it is lightly coloured, pour over it three pints of good gravy soup, lightly tinged with saffron powder, and let it simmer gently till tender. Add to the soup a slight seasoning of salt and cayenne, a thickening of flour and butter, and as much grated Parmesan as will season it. Boil the whole gently for ten minutes, and serve as hot as possible in a soup tureen. No. 2.--Boil and dry the rice as above. Melt a slice of butter in a frying-pan, and fry in this the rice, first colouring it slightly with ground saffron, and seasoning with salt and cayenne. As the rice will burn very easily, it should be fried over a gentle fire, and should be thrown in just as the butter begins to simmer. When it is lightly browned throw in two table-spoonfuls of raisins, picked and cleaned. Serve very hot. The rice must be boiled until it is tender but unbroken.
Two treatments under one heading: No. 1 is essentially a saffron-and-Parmesan rice soup, No. 2 a small fried pilaf with raisins. Both hinge on the same first step, and on not walking away from the pan.
- The hinge: frying parboiled riceRice that has been boiled five minutes and dried has a soft, starchy surface that scorches in seconds. Keep the heat low, keep the grains moving, and stop when they are pale gold rather than brown.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of rice is about 1 1/4 cups raw. Three pints in British measure is about 1.7 litres (roughly 7 US cups), and No. 1 is best read as a soup for six rather than a side dish.
- "Good gravy soup"This means a clear, well-flavoured brown meat stock, not a thickened gravy. A strong beef or veal stock is the closest modern equivalent; commercial broth will need reducing to carry the saffron and cheese.
- Saffron powderGround saffron was sold loose in the period and was often adulterated. Use a good pinch of threads, crushed and steeped in a few spoonfuls of the hot stock, and add gradually — the intent is a light tinge, not a yellow dye.
- Choice of riceVictorian recipes generally called for a long-grain rice, Patna or Carolina, and the instruction "tender but unbroken" suits that kind of grain. Long-grain works for both versions; avoid short-grain or risotto rice, which will break down and cloud the soup.
- The thickening"A thickening of flour and butter" is most likely beurre manie: butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked into the simmering soup in small pieces, though a cooked roux would serve as well. A tablespoon of each will give only a light thickening for this quantity.
- Cheese and heatAdd the Parmesan off a hard boil and the final ten minutes should be a bare simmer, or the cheese will separate into strings. Season with salt only after the cheese is in — Parmesan and reduced stock are both salty.
- Version No. 2Expect a dry, loose pilaf rather than a moist one; the raisins go in at the end only to warm through, since they toughen if fried. Two tablespoonfuls is modest.
The "a la Turque" label — properly, "à la Turque" — attached itself in nineteenth-century British cookery to a range of dishes involving rice, saffron and dried fruit, a shorthand for the eastern Mediterranean rather than a claim about any particular Ottoman dish. Both versions here descend from the pilaf technique — parboil, then fry in fat before the liquid goes in — which reached English kitchens through Anglo-Indian channels as well as Turkish ones, and which explains the persistent Victorian appearance of Patna rice in recipes with Turkish names. What is striking is version No. 1: a rice soup finished with Parmesan and a butter-and-flour thickening, which is far more Italian than Turkish, and shows how loosely such geographical tags were applied in the compendium cookbooks of the period. Cassell's, assembled as a dictionary rather than written as a single author's book, tends to print two or three variants side by side under one heading, and this entry is a good example of that editorial habit.