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Rice, Polish Way of Dressing
Mince an onion finely, and fry it in butter until it begins to turn yellow. Mix with it two ounces of cooked ham finely shredded, and a quarter of a pound of rice boiled as for curry. Stir it lightly over the fire, and season with cayenne and a spoonful of grated Parmesan or Cheddar cheese. Serve hot, piled high on a dish. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes after the rice is boiled. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A quick supper dish of leftover rice, ham and cheese. Everything hinges on the rice being cooked dry and separate before it goes into the pan.
- "Boiled as for curry"Victorian shorthand for rice cooked in plenty of well-salted water, drained, and dried off so the grains stay loose and distinct — the opposite of a creamy risotto. Long-grain rice, boiled 10-12 minutes and drained thoroughly, gives what the book intends.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of rice is roughly 2/3 cup dry, giving something like 1 1/2 to 2 cups cooked; two ounces of ham is a small handful shredded. A "spoonful" of grated cheese here means a tablespoon or so, used as a seasoning rather than a binder.
- Yield, honestly"Sufficient for four or five persons" implies small portions, probably as one dish among others. As a modern lunch or supper it serves two, and the ingredients scale up cleanly.
- The timing"Fifteen to twenty minutes after the rice is boiled" most likely covers the whole operation, onion frying included, rather than that long stirring the rice. Once the onion is soft and yellow, the ham and rice want only two or three minutes of gentle turning to heat through, with the cheese and cayenne stirred in off the heat.
- Butter and the onion"Until it begins to turn yellow" means softened and just starting to colour, not browned. Use a generous knob of butter over medium-low heat; the fat is what keeps the rice from catching.
- Cheese choiceParmesan or a dry, sharp Cheddar both work, but grate finely so it melts into the grains rather than clumping. A milder modern block Cheddar will need a heavier hand to register against the cayenne.
- Probable cost7d is seven pre-decimal pence, from an era when Cassell's gave a probable cost for most recipes for the household accounts. It has no useful modern equivalent beyond signalling that this was a thrift dish.
Cassell's, like most late-Victorian household dictionaries, labelled rice dishes by nationality with a fairly loose hand — "Polish way," "Turkish way," "Indian way" — and the tags say more about British kitchen fashion than about any documented regional practice. What is real here is the underlying technique: rice boiled dry and separate, then tossed with fat, onion and a little cured meat, which is the basic grammar of the pilaf family. Rice and cheese together, and the frugal use of a couple of ounces of cooked ham, place this among the book's many recipes for using up what was already in the larder, dishes that read as exercises in method rather than set pieces. The cayenne is often said to be a giveaway of the period, though how routinely late-Victorian cooks reached for it is not something this page can settle.</p>