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Rissoto Creole
3 tablespoons butter 1 cup rice 2 3/4 cups highly seasoned Brown Stock Canned pimentoes Melt butter in hot frying-pan, add rice, and stir constantly until rice is well browned. Add stock heated to boiling-point, and cook in double boiler until soft. Turn on a serving dish, garnish with pimentoes cut in fancy shapes, and cover with.
Creole Sauce. Cook two tablespoons chopped onion, two tablespoons chopped green pepper, one tablespoon chopped red pepper, or canned pimentoes, and four tablespoons chopped fresh mushrooms, with three tablespoons butter, five minutes. Add two tablespoons flour, one cup tomatoes, one truffle thinly sliced, one-fourth cup sherry wine, and salt to taste.
A browned-rice pilaf finished in a double boiler, served under a tomato-sherry sauce. The method is gentler than a stovetop risotto and the rice is not stirred once the stock goes in.
- The hinge: brown the rice properlyToasting the grains in butter until they are genuinely golden is what gives the dish its flavour; pale rice makes a bland result. Keep the pan over medium heat and stir without stopping, five to eight minutes.
- Rice to useLong-grain white rice suits this best, since the point is separate grains rather than a creamy risotto. The 2 3/4 cups stock to 1 cup rice ratio is generous because a double boiler loses very little to evaporation; expect soft, moist grains rather than dry ones.
- Double boiler timingOver simmering water the rice will take 45 minutes to an hour, considerably longer than direct heat. If you would rather use a heavy covered saucepan on low heat, reduce the stock to about 2 cups and cook 18 to 20 minutes.
- Brown stockIn books of this period this meant a beef stock browned before simmering, usually by searing the meat and bones in fat with the vegetables; dark and well flavoured. A good commercial beef stock works; if it is unsalted, season it firmly before it goes in, since the rice absorbs nearly all of it and is hard to correct afterwards.
- The sauce needs longer than five minutesThe five minutes applies only to softening the vegetables. Once the flour and tomatoes go in, simmer another 10 to 15 minutes so the flour loses its raw taste and the sauce thickens; add the sherry near the end so it does not cook away entirely.
- Tomatoes"one cup tomatoes" most likely means canned tomatoes with their juice, though fresh stewed tomatoes were also used at the time. Chop them or crush them by hand.
- The truffleA thinly sliced truffle was a luxury touch typical of American cookbooks of this period and is not needed for the dish to work. Omit it, or add a few drops of truffle oil at the end; the mushrooms carry the earthiness.
- PimentosJarred roasted red peppers are the direct modern equivalent. Drain and pat them dry before cutting shapes, or they will bleed pink into the rice.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice serves four as a side dish, two or three as a main course with the sauce.
Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks used "Creole" loosely, as a label for anything built on tomatoes, onions, and sweet and hot peppers, whether or not it had much to do with New Orleans kitchens. That is what is happening here: an Italian-derived risotto method, given one of the unsettled English spellings of the period, is dressed with a tomato-pepper sauce and filed under the fashionable name. The luxuries suggest which household the book was written for: a truffle, sherry, and fresh mushrooms all in one sauce, over rice cooked in brown stock. Canned pimentos are an era marker too. Spanish canned pimientos were reaching the American market by the late nineteenth century, and commercial pimiento growing and packing took hold in Georgia in the early 1900s; they turn up in cookery writing as an easy source of colour, cut into fancy shapes as directed here.