Home › The Principles of Cookery › RICE SAVOURY (another way) (Wash half a pound of rice)
RICE SAVOURY (another way) (Wash half a pound of rice)
Wash half a pound of rice, and throw it into fast-boiling water for five minutes. Drain it, simmer it gently with as much nicely-flavoured stock as will cover it, and when it is tender, without being broken, stir into it a slice of fresh butter. Mince finely the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs, and mix with them two ounces of grated Parmesan or Cheshire cheese and half a tea-spoonful of white pepper. Mix them with the rice, and serve hot. Time, about half an hour to simmer the rice. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A simple stock-simmered rice enriched with egg yolk and hard cheese, close in spirit to a risotto made without the constant stirring. The instructions are sound; only the quantities and timings need translating.
- Half a pound of riceRoughly 1 generous cup plus 2 tablespoons of raw rice, around 225 g. Use a medium or short-grain rice if you want it creamy; long-grain will stay separate.
- The five-minute blanchThe initial boil in plenty of water washes off surface starch and starts the grains softening. Drain well and do not rinse in cold water, or the rice will resist the stock.
- Stock quantity"As much as will cover it" is about 2 to 2.5 cups for this weight of rice. Add it in stages rather than all at once so you can stop while the grains are tender but whole.
- Half an hour is longModern rice, already partly blanched here, will usually be done in 15 to 20 minutes of gentle simmering. Taste from 12 minutes on; the half-hour figure assumes older, harder milled rice.
- A slice of fresh butterRead this as about 1 ounce, 30 g. "Fresh" means unsalted, which matters because the stock and the cheese both carry salt.
- Cheshire in place of ParmesanThe book offers them as equals, though they are not identical: Parmesan is drier and sharper, Cheshire a crumbly, milder cow's-milk cheese. Either works, and a mature Cheddar is a reasonable stand-in for the Cheshire.
- Egg yolksMince the cooked yolks finely, or press them through a sieve, so they distribute evenly rather than sitting in lumps; fold them in with the cheese. (The four leftover whites are not used in the original.)
- Pepper and servingHalf a teaspoon of white pepper is assertive by design; the dish has little else in the way of seasoning. Serves five or six as a side or light supper dish, and it wants eating straight away, as it stiffens as it cools.
Savoury rice dishes of this kind sit in Victorian cookery books at the point where rice was moving from the pudding basin to the dinner table, and the treatment here is Italian in outline: rice softened in flavoured stock, finished with butter and grated cheese. The offer of Cheshire as an alternative to Parmesan is the telling detail: Parmesan was available in British shops through the nineteenth century but expensive, and naming a domestic hard cheese alongside it kept the recipe within reach of a modest kitchen. Hard-boiled egg yolk as an enricher does some of the work that a larger quantity of cheese or cream would otherwise do.