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Rice Sauce: a Substitute for Bread Sauce
Wash two ounces of rice, drain it, and simmer until tender in half a pint of milk with a moderate-sized onion, half a dozen peppercorns, and a pinch of salt. Take out the onion and peppercorns, and rub the rice through a sieve; boil it up again with a little more milk if too thick, and dissolve a small piece of butter in it. A piece of mace or six allspice may be stewed in the sauce if liked. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain white sauce thickened with rice rather than crumbs, meant to go beside roast poultry or game. It needs almost nothing modernised beyond the units and a decision about how you purée it.
- Imperial measuresTwo ounces of rice is about a third of a cup of long-grain or pudding rice. Half a pint in this book is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or 1¼ cups; American measuring cups will leave the sauce stiffer than intended, so keep extra milk to hand.
- The hour is mostly unattendedWhite rice softens in 20-30 minutes in milk over low heat; the stated hour presumably also allows for the sieving and the second boil. Use the lowest flame and a heavy pan, and stir often — milk with rice in it scorches on the bottom long before it looks wrong on top.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing hot rice through a fine sieve gives a smooth, slightly grainy sauce. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds but can turn rice gluey if overworked; pulse briefly, then thin with milk.
- Consistency is the hingeRice keeps thickening as it cools and again on standing, so finish the sauce looser than you want it and correct with hot milk just before serving. Aim for something that coats a spoon and slides off, not a paste.
- The aromaticsThe onion, peppercorns and optional blade of mace or allspice berries are infused and removed, exactly as in a béchamel. Whole spices are essential here — ground mace or allspice cannot be strained out and will muddy the colour.
- Butter and seasoning"A small piece of butter" is a generous teaspoon to a tablespoon; it is there for gloss. Taste for salt at the end, since the milk and rice absorb far more than you expect.
- Yield and servingEnough for five or six as a sauce, roughly a cup and a half. It suits roast chicken, turkey or partridge, and unlike bread sauce it contains no wheat.
- "Probable cost, 4d."Fourpence, in the currency of 240 pence to the pound — one of Cassell's standing features, and a reminder that the book was pitched at cooks working to a budget.
Bread sauce is the English standard beside roast fowl and game, and rice sauce is its stand-in for a kitchen with no stale loaf to spare thn the same onion-and-peppercorn infused milk, the same pale colour, a different starch. Rice was cheap and keepable by the late nineteenth century, and the recipe demonstrates a technique: any bland starch will thicken infused milk if it is cooked soft and pushed through a sieve. Recipes of this kind are traditionally said to have served the sick-room and the nursery, where sauces were wanted smooth and unspiced, and rice's reputation as an easily digested food is often given as part of why it turns up as a substitute at all.