Rice Socle
Half a pound of Carolina rice, well washed, blanched, and cooked with half a pint of water.
Bring to boil on stove, and finish in oven. Add more water during cooking, if needed. When tender knead with hand, or pound in mortar.
Shape in mould, or pudding cloth. When quite cold, trim and use.
Chaudfroid of Larks or Quails.
Ingredients.
Larks or Quails.
Half a pint of brown Stock.
Half a gill of Sherry.
A socle is not a dish but a plinth: a block of stiff rice paste, moulded and trimmed, on which a cold entrée such as a chaudfroid of quail is arranged for display. Treat it as construction work rather than cooking.
- The hinge: cook it dry and overwork itA socle must hold a cut edge, so the rice needs to be soft enough to pound but not wet. Add water in small amounts only when the pan threatens to catch, and keep kneading or pounding until the mass is a smooth, sticky paste with no separate grains left. Under-worked rice crumbles when you trim it.
- MeasuresHalf a pint here is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or a scant 1¼ cups, to 8 oz of rice. Half a gill in the chaudfroid ingredients is 2½ imperial fl oz, roughly 5 tablespoons of sherry.
- Carolina riceIn this period the name meant good-quality long-grain white rice, then the prestige import. For a socle you actually want the starch: short-grain pudding rice or arborio moulds and holds far better.
- BlanchedNot blanching in the modern vegetable sense. Cover the washed rice with water, bring to the boil for a minute or two, drain, then start the measured cooking. It rinses off loose starch and scum.
- Finish in ovenThe recipe gives no heat and no time. Cover the pan and use a moderate oven so the rice steams rather than fries at the edges; check it for dryness as it goes and add water as the recipe directs.
- MouldingA plain deep tin, a charlotte mould or a loaf tin all work; the pudding cloth was for a domed block. Pack the paste hard to exclude air pockets, chill several hours until firm, then turn out and trim with a knife dipped in hot water.
- LarksSkylarks are protected in Britain and cannot legally be taken or sold there, and native larks are protected in the United States under migratory bird law; a few EU member states still permit lark hunting under derogation. Quail, farmed and widely available, is the alternative the recipe itself offers.
Socles belong to the display side of late-Victorian and Edwardian grande cuisine, where a cold entr ation was expected to arrive raised above the dish rather than lying flat on it. Cooks built them from rice paste, semolina, bread fried and shaped, or -- in the most elaborate kitchens -- carved fat or tallow, and the choice of rice here marks a version meant to be at least nominally edible. The name is simply the architectural term, French socle, a pedestal or base for a column or statue, which tells you how these buffet pieces were conceived. Carolina rice, named for the Low Country plantations that supplied it, was the standard of quality in British kitchens through the nineteenth century, and its appearance in a recipe like this is a small marker of period rather than of technique.