Home › The Principles of Cookery › RICE (a l'Italienne)
RICE (a l'Italienne)
No. 1.--Wash half a pound of rice in several waters. Throw it into boiling water, and let it boil until tender. Drain and dry it. Wash and drain a moderate-sized cabbage, and shred it finely. Melt a slice of fresh butter in a saucepan, fry in this four ounces of streaky bacon cut into dice, and add the shredded cabbage, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a little pepper and salt. A clove of garlic and a sprig of fennel may be also added, if liked. Cover the saucepan closely, and stew the cabbage as gently as possible for three quarters of an hour. Put in the boiled rice, stew the whole a quarter of an hour longer, and serve the preparation piled high on a hot dish with grated Parmesan or Cheddar cheese sprinkled over the top. No 2.--Boil half a pound of rice, drain and dry it as above. Melt an ounce of butter in a frying-pan, fry in this a moderate-sized onion chopped small, and add the dry rice, the pulp of three baked potatoes, and ounce of grated Parmesan or Cheddar cheese, and a little pepper and salt. When the mixture is thoroughly heated pile it on a hot dish. Lay on the surface some filleted anchovies or sardines, and serve immediately. No. 3.--Boil and dry the rice as above. Fry a chopped onion with a spoonful of salad-oil or an ounce of fresh butter till lightly browned. Add two tea-spoonfuls of curry-paste and half a pint of picked shrimps, and stir these over the fire for four or five minutes. Throw in the boiled rice and one ounce of grated Parmesan or Cheddar, and serve the preparation quite hot. No. 4.--Boil and dry the rice as above. Fry it in hot fat, and mix with it any remains of fish, meat, or poultry that may be at hand, being careful first to divide these into small pieces. Season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, add a spoonful of Parmesan or other cheese, and serve very hot.
Four variations on a plate of dry boiled rice, all built on the same base. The base is the part that matters: the rice is washed, boiled, drained and dried so the grains stay separate, which is the opposite of a risotto and should not be treated as one.
- The hinge: dry the rice properlyAfter draining, spread the rice out in a shallow tray and leave it uncovered in a warm place until the surface is dry and the grains fall apart. Skip this and every version below turns to paste when it hits the pan.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a pound of rice is about 1 1/4 cups dry, roughly 3 1/2 cups cooked. Each variation serves four as a supper dish, three if it is the whole meal.
- "A slice of fresh butter"An imprecise Victorian measure meaning a slab cut from the block, in practice about an ounce. "Fresh" means unsalted, as against the heavily salted keeping butter of the period.
- Half a pint of shrimpsA volume measure for shellfish, equal to roughly 8 oz of small peeled shrimp. "Picked" means already boiled and shelled, so four or five minutes in the pan is only to warm them through and bloom the curry paste.
- Curry pasteTwo teaspoons of a modern madras-style paste is a reasonable stand-in for the bottled Victorian product; note that the recipe adds the paste and the shrimps to the hot fat together.
- Salad-oilPlain refined oil, usually olive, sold for dressings. Any neutral oil or a light olive oil works.
- Cabbage timingThree quarters of an hour covered with bacon and butter is a slow braise, not a fault - the cabbage collapses and sweetens. Keep the heat genuinely low and check for scorching, since a modern thin-based pan gives up much sooner than a Victorian one.
- Version 4 and leftoversCold cooked fish, meat or poultry reheated in the pan should be brought right through to steaming hot, not merely warmed. Cut it small, as instructed, so it heats at the same rate as the rice.
- CheeseThe Parmesan-or-Cheddar substitution is the book's own, and it holds: use a hard aged cheese that grates dry. A young supermarket cheddar will grease the rice.
Cassell's files these under the general heading of rice cookery rather than under any Italian dish, and "a l'Italienne" here signals little more than the presence of grated Parmesan, which was available in British grocers as a hard keeping cheese. The four numbered versions are characteristic of the late-Victorian dictionary format: one set of instructions for boiling rice, then a spread of dressings ranging from bacon and cabbage to filleted anchovies and curry paste, the last frankly a way of using "any remains of fish, meat, or poultry that may be at hand". That thrift is the real subject. Boiled-and-dried rice, kept dry so the grains separate, was the standard English treatment throughout the century and arguably owes more to Anglo-Indian cookery than to Italian - the risotto method of cooking rice in its liquid until creamy is generally thought not to have been widely known in British kitchens until considerably later.