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Spanish Rice
Boil half a pound of rice as for curry, then toss it lightly over a slow fire with a spoonful of salad-oil till it is a bright-yellow colour. Unless great care is taken the rice will burn. Free two large ripe tomatoes from the seeds and juice, and afterwards stir them in with the rice, add a seasoning of black pepper and grated Parmesan, and serve the preparation piled on a hot dish. Garnish with thin slices of ham, German sausage, or dried and smoked fish. If ripe tomatoes cannot be procured, a table-spoonful of tomato sauce may be used instead.
A short late-Victorian side dish that reads as a way of using up cold boiled rice. Two things in the text need interpreting before you start.
- The "bright-yellow colour"Oil and heat alone will not turn white rice yellow; browning would take it well past bright. The colour most likely comes from the boiling stage, since rice boiled for curry was sometimes tinted with turmeric or saffron. Add a pinch of either to the cooking water if you want the stated result.
- Half a pound of riceAbout 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of long-grain rice by weight, yielding roughly 3 cups cooked. This serves four as a side dish, two as a light supper.
- Salad-oilPeriod shorthand for olive oil. A tablespoon is enough for this quantity; a "spoonful" here is not a fixed measure.
- Keeping it from burningThe warning is the hinge of the recipe. Use a wide pan over genuinely low heat, and turn the rice with a fork rather than stirring it, which breaks the grains and makes them stick.
- The tomatoesSeeded and drained, two large tomatoes give very little liquid, which is the point — this is not meant to be a wet pilaf. Chop them and fold in off the heat so they warm through without collapsing.
- Tomato sauce as substituteThe Victorian bottled version was a cooked, sieved tomato preparation, often spiced and sharpened with vinegar rather than the plain purée we would use now. A tablespoon of passata is a serviceable modern stand-in; modern ketchup will add more sugar than the dish wants.
- German sausageA cured, sliceable smoked sausage of the mettwurst or Cervelat type. Any firm smoked salami-style sausage sliced thin does the same job as a garnish.
- ParmesanGrate it in at the end while the rice is hot, and season carefully — between the cheese and the ham or smoked fish garnish, the dish carries a good deal of salt already.
"Spanish rice" in nineteenth-century British and American cookery books was applied loosely to rice cooked with tomato and oil, often with a saffron or turmeric colouring; the name gestured at Mediterranean practice rather than at any particular Spanish dish. The instruction to boil the rice "as for curry" first and season it afterwards, rather than cooking everything together as a paella or risotto would, treats rice as a plain boiled staple to be dressed up. The suggestion of tomato sauce when fresh tomatoes cannot be had reflects a period in which tomatoes were still seasonal and prepared tomato products were available as a standby.