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Rosetti
Chop an onion very fine, and put it into a frying-pan with a table-spoonful of butter. When cooked, mix two breakfast-cupfuls of cold boiled rice, half a pound of minced tongue or ham, and two hard-boiled eggs chopped finely. Put this into the frying-pan with the onion and a little milk; add salt and pepper to taste, and fry for a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A leftovers dish in the mould of kedgeree: cold rice, cured meat and egg bound with a little milk and fried until hot through. Almost everything hinges on the rice being properly cold and dry before it meets the pan.
- Breakfast-cupfulA Victorian breakfast cup holds about 10 fl oz, so two cupfuls is roughly 2½ US cups of cooked rice, or about 1 cup raw. Day-old refrigerated rice separates into grains; freshly cooked rice will turn the dish to paste.
- Tablespoonful of butterPeriod spoon sizes were not standardised, and a Victorian tablespoon was often a little larger than the modern one. About 1 oz (2 modern tablespoons) works well in practice for this quantity of onion and keeps the rice from sticking, though that is a cook's judgement rather than a strict conversion.
- Minced tongue or hamHalf a pound of cooked, cured meat chopped small, not raw mince. Pressed ox tongue is still sold at good delicatessens; thick-cut cooked ham or a piece of gammon does the same work.
- Fry for a quarter of an hourFifteen minutes is only tolerable over moderate heat with frequent turning, and the payoff is browned crust on some of the rice. Left undisturbed on high heat it scorches; if you want it merely hot, five or six minutes is enough.
- The milk"A little" means a few tablespoons, added to loosen the mixture, not to make it wet. Too much and the rice steams into porridge rather than frying.
- Chopped eggFold the hard-boiled egg in near the end rather than at the start, or fifteen minutes of stirring will break it down and dull the dish.
- Cold rice and food safetyCooked rice held at room temperature is the classic vehicle for Bacillus cereus. Chill it promptly after boiling, keep it refrigerated, and fry it thoroughly hot in one go.
- YieldServes three to four as a supper or breakfast dish. Cassell's "probable cost, 1s. 6d." is a household budgeting note, not a measurement.
The name is a puzzle that Cassell's does not explain — some entries in the New Dictionary of Cookery carry fanciful or borrowed titles attached to what are, structurally, thrift dishes, and "Rosetti" appears to be one of them. What the recipe actually is is a rice hash of the same family as kedgeree and pilau. Kedgeree entered British cooking through Anglo-Indian households; pilau had already been appearing in English cookery books well before the nineteenth century. Such dishes settled into the breakfast and supper repertoire because they turned cold rice, scraps of cured meat and a boiled egg into a hot dish. Tongue is a characteristic detail of the period: many Victorian household cookbooks assume a pressed or boiled ox tongue somewhere in the larder, and a number of recipes exist chiefly to use up its trimmings. The costing in pence and shillings was a standard feature of Cassell's, aimed at a household reckoning the expense of a dish.