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Rice with Cheese
Four cups of boiling water, add a teaspoon of salt; while boiling add gradually a cup of rice, and with a fork lift it once or twice, shaking the kettle that none of the kernels stick to the bottom. Let boil twenty minutes, remove from the fire, pour off the water, if any, and stir in one tablespoon of grated cheese. in baking dish, cover top with grated cheese and brown in oven.
— Mrs. Thomas E. Jones
Put QUICK WAY TO COOK STRING OR WAX BEANS.
To one quart of beans melt one tablespoon of butter in a kettle, stir in cut up beans until well greased. Steam for a very few minutes, then cover with hot water and when boiling add pinch of soda. Cook for about half an hour. Add seasoning and milk.
— Mrs. Harry Hall
SPINACH (Fine).
Clean spinach thoroughly and cook in a small quantity of boiling water about twenty minutes (until soft). Strain and chop fine. Take a half-tablespoon of lard, also butter, melt, add tablespoon of flour, and stir until yellow (not brown). Put in spinach and season with salt and pepper. If too stiff thin with a little water. Garnish with slices of hard boiled eggs if desired.
— Miss Lydia W. Bagley
A plain baked rice and cheese dish from an era when rice was boiled in abundant salted water and drained like pasta. The quantities are generous with liquid and light on cheese by modern taste.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given for the browning. A hot oven of 425-450F for 10-15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler, will colour the top without drying the rice.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes of hard boiling in four cups of water was normal for the drained method. Timings vary by rice; start checking at 15 minutes and drain as soon as the grains are tender, since overcooked rice turns pasty once baked.
- Draining"Pour off the water, if any" shows this is the drained, not absorbed, method. Let the rice steam dry in the hot pan for a minute after draining so the cheese does not slide off a wet surface.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese"; a firm grating cheese such as cheddar is the likeliest reading. One tablespoon stirred through the rice from a cup of raw rice is very restrained; 1/2 to 3/4 cup grated in the rice and another 1/2 cup on top gives the dish the flavour a modern palate expects.
- Fork, not spoonThe direction to lift with a fork and shake the kettle matters more than it sounds. Stirring boiled rice with a spoon breaks the grains and releases starch, which is what makes a baked rice dish gluey.
- Buttering the dishNothing is said about greasing the baking dish. Butter it, or the cheese will weld to the sides.
- YieldA cup of raw rice gives about three cups cooked — four modest side servings, or two as a supper dish.
Community cookbooks like this one collected the everyday cooking of a single town, each receipt signed by the woman who contributed it, and the plainness here is characteristic: rice, water, salt, cheese, and nothing else. Rice reached inland New York households as a cheap, shelf-stable staple shipped north from the Carolina and Gulf coast crops, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was standard pantry stock well outside the regions that grew it. The drained-and-baked treatment reflects the general American habit of the period, in which rice was boiled hard in a large volume of salted water rather than steamed by absorption; the pilaf method familiar today was still largely confined to cookbooks that dealt in "foreign" cookery. Adding cheese and browning the top turns a side dish into a meatless main, the sort of thing that appeared on Friday tables and in Lenten weeks without anyone needing to say so.