Home › Rice, Hominy, Cereals, Etc. › Rice and Mutton
Rice and Mutton
Boil the rice and line sides and bottom of a good-sized oval mold. Fill the center with minced cold mutton seasoned with salt, pepper, onion juice, a little curry and moistened with gravy. Cover the top with some reserved rice and steam for an hour. Turn out on a platter, pour round it a tomato sauce and garnish with tiny cucumber pickles.
A leftover-meat mould of the kind that filled out cheap Victorian and Edwardian suppers. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how sticky the rice is.
- The hinge: cook the rice softThe rice has to hold together as a wall, so it must be cooked past the point of separate grains — a short or medium grain simmered until slightly gluey, then used warm. Long-grain rice cooked fluffy will collapse when you turn the mould out.
- Mould and liningAn oval pudding basin or 1.5-quart metal mould works. Butter it generously and press the rice in a layer about half an inch thick up the sides and across the bottom, packing firmly with the back of a wet spoon.
- SteamingCover the mould tightly with foil or a plate and set it on a rack in a covered pot with an inch or two of simmering water, topping up as needed. An hour is right for heating through and setting; it is not cooking the filling, which is already cooked.
- "Onion juice"Period cooks grated an onion and used the liquid pressed from it. A tablespoon of very finely grated onion, or a teaspoon of onion juice squeezed from the pulp, gives the same effect without wet chunks in the filling.
- "A little curry"Almost certainly commercial curry powder, the blends of the day generally being milder than many sold now. Start with a teaspoon for a pound of meat and taste.
- GravyEnough to make the mince moist but not loose — roughly a third of a cup per pound. Too much and the rice wall softens and slumps on the platter.
- MuttonTrue mutton is hard to buy; leftover roast lamb shoulder or leg is the direct substitute, and cold roast beef works with the same seasoning. Chop by hand rather than in a processor so the filling has texture.
- Turning outLet the mould stand five minutes off the heat, run a thin knife around the edge, then invert onto a warmed platter. Serve the tomato sauce around the base rather than over the top so the rice keeps its shape.
- YieldA 1.5-quart mould with about a pound of meat serves four to five as a main course.
Moulded rice borders were a standing trick of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economical cookery: cold roast meat, which many households had after a Sunday joint, was minced, seasoned hard enough to disguise its age, and given a new shape so it could reappear at table as a dish in its own right rather than as leftovers. The curry powder points to the same lineage — British and American cookbooks of the period reached for curry almost automatically when reheating cold mutton, a habit inherited from Anglo-Indian kitchens where warmed-over meat was routinely recast as curry. Rice earned its place in books of this sort because it was among the cheapest fillers available and, unlike potatoes, could be architecture as well as bulk. The tomato sauce and the row of cucumber gherkins are pure presentation, the low-cost cook's answer to the elaborate garnishes of grander service.