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Rice Balls
1 cup cold cooked rice 2 tablespoons flour salt, cayenne, nutmeg 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 egg Press rice through sieve, add flour, egg and seasonings. Roll in balls, allowing a teaspoon for each ball. Cook in boiling salted water until they harden on the outside. Serve hot with soup.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in itself — small rice dumplings poached to firmness and dropped into clear broth. The recipe assumes you know what it should feel like, so the texture cues matter more than the numbers.
- Sieve, don't skipPressing the cold rice through a sieve is the hinge of the recipe. It breaks the grains into a paste that the egg and flour can bind; rice left whole gives balls that fall apart in the water. A ricer or food mill does the same work faster.
- Cold rice means coldRice cooked ahead and thoroughly chilled is drier and firmer, and holds together better than a batch cooled for twenty minutes. Warm rice will slacken the mixture and you will be tempted to add more flour, which makes the balls heavy.
- Seasonings are undosedSalt, cayenne and nutmeg are given without amounts, which was normal in cookery books of the period. A pinch of nutmeg and a scant pinch of cayenne to a cup of rice is in keeping; poach one ball as a tester before rolling the rest rather than tasting the raw egg mixture.
- Egg sizeEggs of the period are often said to have run somewhat smaller than a modern large one. If the mixture is too loose to roll, use a little more flour rather than less egg — the egg is what sets the balls in the water.
- Poach, don't boil hardThe recipe says boiling salted water; in practice a bare simmer once the balls go in is gentler, since a hard rolling boil can knock them apart. No time is given, and the cue in the text — firming on the outside — is the one to watch for.
- Size and yieldA teaspoon of mixture gives a ball about the size of a small marble. The recipe states no yield, and a cup of rice with the flour and egg will make a great many such balls.
- ServingLift them out with a slotted spoon and drop them into hot broth at the last moment; they will soften if held in the poaching water. Consommé, chicken broth or a clear vegetable stock suits them best.
Small forcemeat and starch dumplings floated in clear soup were a fixture of turn-of-the-century American and English cookery, where a consommé was expected to arrive with something in it — royale custard, marrow balls, quenelles, or, more economically, leftover rice bound with egg. Lowney's book, published by the Massachusetts chocolate firm and best remembered for its confectionery, nonetheless covers a full domestic repertoire, and this entry sits squarely in the thrift tradition: a cup of yesterday's rice, a spoonful of parsley and a scrap of lemon rind turned into a garnish that looks deliberate. The lemon rind and nutmeg pairing is an older English seasoning habit, carried into American kitchens through the nineteenth century, and it survives here in a recipe that would otherwise be plain to the point of invisibility.