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Hamburger and Rice
1 lb. hamburger steak 1 onion, cut fine Jessie Ray. ½ Cuncooked rice Salt to taste Mix steak with onion, rice and salt. Shape in small cakes, dust with flour, place in baking dish, add 1 cup water, bake slowly for two hours, adding more water when needed. When about done, add 1 pint tomatoes. Serve very hot.
Gertie Wells.
A plain church-supper casserole in the porcupine-meatball family: raw rice mixed into the meat, then baked long and slow so the grains swell inside the cakes. A few of the printed measures have come through the scanner damaged.
- The stray nameThe rice quantity was checked against the printed page and reads half a cup of uncooked rice to a pound of meat, as given here. The stray "Jessie Ray." is another contributor's name that drifted into the column; where it belongs cannot be recovered from this page.
- Hamburger steakIn community books of this kind this means plain ground beef. Anything from 80/20 to 85/15 will behave as intended; very lean beef gives dry, crumbly cakes.
- Bake slowlyNo temperature is given; a slow oven of the period was somewhere in the 250-325F range, and around 300F suits this dish. Two hours at that heat lets the rice hydrate fully — undercooked rice in the centre of a meat cake is the usual failure here.
- Water managementThe rice drinks the cup of water well before the two hours are up. Check every half hour and add hot water a little at a time; the dish should stay moist but never swim, or the cakes fall apart.
- A pint of tomatoesMost likely home-canned tomatoes, though a pint of fresh measured by volume is also possible. A 14-15 oz tin of whole or diced tomatoes with their juice is the nearest modern equivalent. Adding them at the end, as directed, matters: their acid slows rice from softening if added early.
- Dusting with flourThe flour coating sets a light crust and thickens the pan liquid into a rough gravy. Pat the cakes dry before dusting or the flour turns pasty.
- DonenessGround beef should reach 160F throughout, which two hours at 300F comfortably achieves. Judge the rice as well — bite a cake open rather than trusting the clock.
- YieldA pound of beef with the rice makes eight to ten small cakes, enough for four as a luncheon dish with bread.
Recipes that bury raw rice in seasoned ground meat turn up across American and European home cooking — the cabbage-roll filling without the cabbage, and often said to be a forerunner of the mid-century "porcupine meatball," so called because the grains poke out as they swell. Their appeal in a congregation cookbook like this one is economy: half a cup of rice stretches a pound of beef to feed a table, and the long slow bake needed no watching while the cook was elsewhere. Community fundraising cookbooks of this period are generally thought to have been compiled from contributions submitted by members, which may be why measures are casual, oven heat is described rather than numbered, and each dish carries the name of the woman who contributed it — Gertie Wells here, with Jessie Ray's name also appearing.