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Rice, Browned
Boil some rice as for curry (see RICE, BOILED, FOR CURRY), and leave it to get cold. Take a baking-tin, butter it lightly, put the rice in a thin layer, and bake it in the oven to a golden brown, turning it about to colour equally. It must not get dry, but only as much butter as is needed to keep it from burning is to be used. It is an improvement to boil the rice in stock. Probable cost, 4d. for a dish of half a pound.
A straightforward way of using up cold boiled rice, closer to a dry-roasted garnish than to a pilaf. The whole thing hinges on keeping the grains separate and moving.
- Start cold and dryRice boiled as for curry (Cassell's gives that method under a separate entry) must be thoroughly cold before it goes in the tin. Warm or damp rice steams and clumps instead of browning.
- Oven temperatureCassell's gives none. A hot oven, in the region of 400–425F, should colour the grains before they harden; a slower oven risks drying the rice out before it takes any gold, and the recipe is explicit that it must not get dry.
- Turning is the instruction that mattersStir and turn every 5 minutes or so. Left alone, the surface grains scorch while those underneath stay pale, and the tin ends up with two textures rather than one.
- Butter, sparinglyThe original is emphatic that only enough butter to prevent burning should be used, and the tin itself is merely 'buttered lightly'. A teaspoon or so per half pound is the right order; more and you are making a fried rice.
- Stock instead of waterThe suggested improvement is real. Boiling the rice in a well-flavoured meat or chicken stock leaves enough dissolved solids on the grains to help them brown and to season them from within.
- Timing and yieldExpect perhaps 20–30 minutes with regular turning. The recipe's 'dish of half a pound' is not specified as raw or cooked weight, so the yield is uncertain; the 4d. cost is a Victorian household figure and no guide to anything now.
- What to do with itPresumably a bed or border for curries, stews and made dishes, though the recipe does not say. Best served straight from the oven.
Browned rice belongs to the Anglo-Indian side of the late Victorian kitchen, where curry had become a fixture of the middle-class table and rice was expected to appear in more than one guise. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, reissued over several decades, is arranged alphabetically like a reference book, so rice accumulates a long run of short entries — boiled, for curry, ground, browned, in cakes and puddings — each a variation on the last. The instruction to boil the grain in stock rather than water reflects a household in which stock was always going, and the costing in pence per dish reflects a readership of cooks answerable to a mistress for the week's accounts. Browning cooked rice in fat to give it colour and a nutty flavour is a very old technique with parallels across Persian, Indian and Levantine cooking; here it has been pared down to something a kitchen could do in a baking tin alongside whatever else was in the oven.