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Rice and Egg Pates
Mix cold rice with well-beaten eggs, season with pepper, and salt. Then cook like scrambled egg; don't let the rice burn.
A two-line breakfast dish built on leftover rice. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so the only real decisions are ratio and heat.
- ProportionsRoughly one cup of cooked cold rice to three eggs gives a dish that still reads as eggs rather than fried rice. More rice than that and it goes dry, since rice absorbs the loose egg rather than setting with it.
- Cold rice mattersRice straight from the pot is wet and sticky and will clump into pasty lumps. Day-old refrigerated rice has firmed up and separates into grains, which is the whole point of the dish.
- Break up the rice firstRub the cold rice between your fingers to separate the grains before the eggs go in. Once it is bound in egg you cannot fix a lump.
- HeatMedium-low is what "don't let the rice burn" is warning against; the recipe names no fat, so use butter or whatever fat you prefer. The starchy grains catch and scorch on the pan bottom well before the egg is set, so keep the mass moving with a spatula.
- DonenessPull the pan off the heat while the egg still looks slightly underdone; the rice holds a great deal of heat and will finish the job. Eggs cooked to firm in the pan will be squeaky by the time they reach the plate.
- SeasoningRice is bland and soaks up salt, so this needs more than you would use for plain scrambled eggs. Season the beaten egg rather than the finished dish.
- YieldThe quantities above serve two as a breakfast, or three or four alongside ham or sausage.
- The name"Pates" here is neither pâté nor pastry; the method given is plain scrambling, and the reason the title uses the word is unclear.
Rice appears constantly in nineteenth-century Virginia cookery, and this recipe belongs to the tradition of using yesterday's boiled rice rather than throwing it out. Charleston and the Carolina Lowcountry were the center of American rice growing before the Civil War, and rice traveled north through the Tidewater as an everyday starch, boiled plain. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these thrifty second-day dishes, generally given in a sentence or two on the assumption that the reader already knows how to scramble an egg. The pairing of rice with eggs for breakfast shows up across the rice-growing South in various forms, and the same instinct produced the rice cakes and rice croquettes that sit nearby in books of this period.