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Rice Paste for Savoury Dishes
Put seasoned cutlets of veal, lamb, chicken, or game already cooked into a pie-dish, and cover the meat with a layer of rice which has been boiled to a stiff paste in milk, with a little pepper, salt, and onion for seasoning. Brush over with egg, and put it in the oven for a minute or two, to colour the paste lightly. A little egg mixed with the rice will make it adhere better.
This is a rice-topped meat pie in place of a pastry-topped one — a way of using up cold roast or braised meat. The original assumes you already know how to boil rice down to a paste, so that is where the detail is needed.
- The hinge: the rice must be genuinely stiffBoiled rice for this needs to be cooked well past the point of tenderness in milk until it holds a spoon upright and can be spread rather than poured. Round or short-grain pudding rice breaks down and thickens readily; long-grain basmati tends to stay separate and is much less willing to go to a paste.
- Milk quantityNone is given. Roughly 4 parts milk to 1 part rice by volume, added in stages over low heat and stirred, gets you there; expect 30-40 minutes. It should be closer to a thick risotto than to a rice pudding.
- "A pie-dish"A shallow oval or round earthenware dish of about 1-1.5 quarts. Any modern pie plate or gratin dish works. About a pound of cooked meat and 1 cup of raw rice fills one and serves four.
- Onion seasoningGrate the onion finely or infuse the milk with a halved onion and remove it — chunks of raw onion will not soften in a milk-thickened rice and will taste harsh.
- The egg does two jobsOne beaten egg stirred into the rice off the heat (let it cool a minute first so it does not scramble) binds the paste; a second, brushed on top, gives the colour. Both are worth doing.
- "A minute or two" is far too short"A minute or two" is short -- That timing presumably assumes a hot range and food that went in warm, since the meat is already cooked and the oven is only there to colour the top. If your meat and rice are cold from the refrigerator, give the dish 25-30 minutes at 400F to heat through, then a few minutes under the broiler to brown the glaze. If everything is still hot, the broiler alone will do it.
- Cutlets "already cooked"This is a reheating recipe, not a way to cook raw chops. Use leftover roast lamb, veal, chicken or game birds, sliced or boned; add a few spoonfuls of gravy or stock under the rice or the finished dish will be dry.
Cassell's belongs to a period when a great deal of British cookery was organised around the second appearance of a joint, and the pastry-topped pie was the standard vehicle for it. Substituting a stiff milk-boiled rice for the crust saved butter and flour, and versions of the idea turn up across late nineteenth-century household manuals: rice borders round a dish, and rice lids like this one. The trick is a cousin of the French bordure de riz and shares a technique with the sweet baked rice pudding: rice cooked in milk until the starch has gone to paste holds its shape when cold and browns under heat. Rice itself was cheap and abundant in Britain by then, arriving largely from India and Burma, and it appears throughout books of this era in many guises, including as an economical stretcher of meat.