Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice Omelet
Rice Omelet
Take half a pound of rice and boil it till tender in a pint and a half of milk; boil a stick of vanilla in half a pint of cream, and stir the cream into the warm rice with half a pound of fresh butter. When cool, add the yolks of ten eggs well beaten up, some white sugar, and a very little salt. Last of all, stir in the whites when beaten to snow; bake the omelet rather less than an hour.
This is a sweet baked rice soufflé rather than a pan omelet, and the original leaves out both the oven heat and the sugar quantity. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no oven heat; a moderate oven, around 350F/180C, is a reasonable modern reading. Bake in a buttered dish deep enough that the mixture comes no more than two-thirds up the side, since it will rise like a soufflé and then settle.
- Sugar is unspecified"Some white sugar" is genuinely open. For half a pound of rice and ten yolks, 4-6 oz (about 1/2 to 3/4 cup) gives a lightly sweet pudding; go higher if you want it dessert-sweet.
- The butterHalf a pound of butter to half a pound of rice is a Victorian richness that reads as excessive now. Cutting it to 4 oz produces a lighter result without harming the structure.
- Rice and liquidUse a short-grain pudding rice. Half a pound in a pint and a half of milk (UK pints, so about 30 fl oz) cooks down to a thick porridge; stir often over low heat, as milk-cooked rice catches easily.
- Vanilla stickA whole vanilla pod simmered in the cream, then lifted out. Split it first to release the seeds. Two teaspoons of extract stirred into the cream off the heat is the practical substitute.
- Cool before the yolksThe instruction to add yolks only when the rice has cooled is the hinge. Beaten yolks dropped into hot rice will scramble into threads and the finished dish will be grainy. Let it come down to warm-to-the-touch.
- Folding the whitesTen whites beaten to snow are what lift this. Fold them in with a light hand in two or three additions and get the dish into the oven immediately; a beaten batter left standing collapses.
- Doneness and yield"rather less than an hour" should give a set centre with a slight wobble; test rather than trust the clock. This quantity serves eight to ten, and it is best eaten soon after it leaves the oven, before it sinks.
The Victorian kitchen used "omelet" more loosely than we do: the word could cover dishes bound and lightened with beaten eggs, sweet as well as savoury, and baked omelets of this sort sat comfortably in the pudding course. What is described here is essentially a rice soufflé, a relation of the French gâteau de riz and of the milk-boiled rice puddings common in English households. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century for a large middle-class readership, carries many such hybrids, and the ingredients suggest the intended reader: a whole vanilla pod, half a pint of cream and ten eggs mark this as a dish for a household with a cook and a decent budget, not the plain rice pudding of the same period.