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Rice and Ginger Fritters
Boil a tea-cupful of rice in two breakfast-cupfuls of milk, add some preserved ginger chopped small, sugar to taste, and two beaten eggs. Mix well, and pour into a pie-dish. Bake till set, then cut into slices about two inches long, an inch wide, and half an inch thick. Dry these pieces with powdered sugar, dip into batter, and throw one at a time into a saucepan containing smoking hot oil in which a wire frying basket has been placed. Directly the fritters are a nice brown take them out, shake some finely-powdered sugar over them, pile up on a dish, and serve. Probable cost, 9d.
A set rice custard, cut into fingers, battered and deep-fried — essentially a sweet croquette. Everything depends on the baked slab being cold and firm before you cut it.
- Chill before cuttingThe recipe moves straight from baking to slicing, but in practice the slab cuts far better once cold and firm; a few hours' cooling helps the pieces hold together in the fryer.
- The cupsA Victorian teacupful is about 5 fl oz (2/3 cup) and a breakfast-cupful about 10 fl oz (1 1/4 cups), so roughly 2/3 cup rice to 2 1/2 cups milk. Use short-grain or pudding rice, which releases the starch needed to hold the slab together.
- Baking the custardNo temperature is given: 325–350F is right, and the dish is set when a knife comes out clean, about 35–45 minutes for a shallow pie-dish. Higher heat curdles the egg and weeps liquid.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars — not crystallised ginger, which is drier, and not fresh root. Drain it before chopping, and account for its sweetness before adding sugar.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot" is a misleading instruction with modern refined oils, which smoke well above frying range. Aim for 350–375F and fry a few at a time so the temperature holds.
- The basketLowering pieces into a basket already sitting in the oil, one at a time, keeps them from sticking to each other or the pan bottom. A spider or slotted spoon does the same job.
- Sugar twiceThe first dusting of powdered sugar dries the cut surface so the batter clings; the second is finishing. Do not skip the first.
- YieldThe quantities make a modest slab, so the number of fingers will depend entirely on the dish used. The "probable cost, 9d" is Cassell's own late-Victorian pricing and has no modern equivalent.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of large British household dictionaries, and the sweet fritter made from a set rice pudding — cooked firm, cut, battered and fried — sits alongside fried semolina and fried polenta fingers elsewhere in Europe. Preserved ginger reached Britain in ceramic jars from China, Canton among the ports, and by the later nineteenth century it appears in domestic puddings as well as confectioners' work. The "probable cost" line is characteristic of Cassell's and of comparable household compilations, aimed at readers budgeting to the penny.