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Rice and Cheese
Wash some rice and boil it for ten or eleven minutes in milk (the proportion being a tea-cupful of rice to two breakfast-cupfuls of milk), and let it stand till it has soaked up all the milk. Mix in some grated cheese and a little pepper and salt, place the mixture in a piedish, cover the top with grated cheese, and place the pie-dish in the oven and bake till the top of the pudding is nicely browned.
A plain milk-and-cheese rice bake of the sort that filled out a supper table. Two things need attention: the cup measures, and the fact that ten minutes of boiling does not cook rice through.
- The cupsA Victorian teacupful is about 5 fl oz and a breakfast cupful about 10 fl oz, so the working proportion is roughly 2/3 cup rice to 2 1/2 cups milk. That is a generous ratio, which is the point — the grain is meant to swallow all of it.
- Rice and the standing timeTen or eleven minutes leaves ordinary long-grain rice chalky at the centre. Keep the pan covered and off the heat in a warm place until the milk is fully absorbed and the grains yield, or simply simmer gently, covered, for 18 to 20 minutes. The dish should be soft and slack before it ever reaches the oven; the bake only browns the top.
- ScorchingRice in milk sticks and catches easily. A heavy pan, a low flame and frequent stirring matter more here than in a water boil, and a burnt bottom will flavour the whole dish.
- The cheeseA hard, dry, sharp cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire suits the dish best, though the recipe says only "grated cheese". About 4 oz stirred through and 1 to 2 oz scattered on top is a fair reading of "some" and "cover the top". Very young or high-moisture cheese will weep oil rather than brown.
- OvenNo temperature is given because none could be. Use 400F: hot enough to colour the cheese crust in 15 to 20 minutes without drying the body of the pudding. The mixture is already cooked, so you are browning, not baking through.
- SeasoningRice and milk absorb salt heavily and the dish is bland without a firm hand. Season the mixture, taste it before it goes in the dish, and consider mustard powder or a scrape of nutmeg, both period-appropriate with cheese.
- YieldEnough for three or four as a supper dish or a vegetable course, in a pie dish of about 1 1/2 pints. It sets as it cools and reheats well.
This belongs to the great Victorian family of milk-and-starch suppers — macaroni cheese, cheese pudding, savoury rice — which gave a household a hot, filling, meatless dish out of very little. It reads as a teaching example of how a cheap grain plus milk plus a browned cheese crust becomes a dish. Rice was best known in British kitchens as a pudding grain, sweetened and baked slowly, and savoury treatments like this one were still worth spelling out for a cook who assumed rice meant dessert. The instruction to let the rice stand and soak up all the milk rather than draining it is the older method, and it is also the thrifty one — nothing is poured away.