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Baked Rice and Cheese
Grate or finely chop some American or Gruyere cheese. Butter a baking dish and fill it with alternate layers of boiled rice and cheese, seasoning well with salt and pepper. Over all pour a thin white sauce using only enough to moisten without making it very soft. Sprinkle the top with buttered crumbs and brown in a quick oven. This may be made into a main dinner dish by substituting a raw custard for the white sauce, thus adding to its nutritive qualities.
A frugal rice gratin with no quantities given at all, which is typical of the period's economy pamphlets. The proportions are yours to set; the only real risks are a soupy dish or a scorched top.
- Quick ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. At that heat the crumbs brown quickly, which is all the dish needs since everything in it is already cooked.
- American cheeseIn a book of this era "American cheese" means a firm factory cheddar, not the processed slices sold under that name now. Any sharp cheddar works; Gruyere gives the nuttier result the recipe offers as an alternative.
- Working proportionsAbout 3 cups cooked rice, 6 oz grated cheese and 1 cup thin white sauce fills a 1 1/2-quart dish and serves four as a side, two or three as a supper. Thin white sauce here is roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk.
- Moisten, do not floodThis is the hinge. Rice keeps absorbing liquid in the oven, so the assembled dish should look barely damp rather than saucy; too much sauce and the layers collapse into porridge.
- Season the rice, not just the layersBoiled rice made without salt will taste flat no matter how well you season between layers. Salt the cooking water, and go lightly on salt afterwards since the cheese carries plenty.
- Buttered crumbsToss dry breadcrumbs with melted butter, roughly 2 tablespoons butter to 1/2 cup crumbs, until they look damp. Unbuttered crumbs in a quick oven go pale and dusty.
- The custard versionRoughly two eggs beaten into a cup of milk, poured over in place of the sauce. Custard sets and weeps if pushed hard, so it is safer to bake that variant at a moderate heat (about 350F) until just firm in the centre, and finish the crumbs briefly under the broiler if they need colour.
Recipes like this belong to the long campaign, waged by domestic-science writers from the 1890s through the First World War, to persuade households that cheese and eggs could stand in for meat at the centre of dinner. The final sentence gives the argument away: the custard is recommended not for flavour but for "nutritive qualities," the language of the protein accounting that had entered household cookery via the food-chemistry work of the period. Rice earned its place in these books because it was cheap, shelf-stable and filling, and gratins of this kind — layered, crumbed, browned — let a small amount of expensive cheese season a large amount of inexpensive starch.