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Sweet Rice Croquettes
Cook one cup rice in two cups milk in double boiler, until liquid is absorbed and rice is tender; add one fourth cup sugar and one half teaspoon salt. Cool, add two egg yolks, shape in form of nests, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry in deep fat, hollow downward. Drain on brown paper; fill nests with cubes of jelly.
A sweet croquette built on a stiff rice pudding, fried and filled at the last moment. Everything depends on getting the rice paste dry enough and cold enough to hold a shape in hot fat.
- The hinge: chill it hard"Cool" means thoroughly cold, not room temperature. Spread the sweetened rice on a plate, cover, and refrigerate at least two hours; the shaped nests are better still for a further half hour in the freezer before breading. Warm rice will slump and burst in the fat.
- Rice to useA short- or medium-grain rice (arborio, carnaroli, or a pudding rice) gives the starch needed to bind; long-grain and converted rice bind less readily. One cup rice to two cups milk is a tight ratio: the recipe gives no time, so cook it covered in the double boiler until the grains are soft and the milk absorbed, stirring now and then, and add a splash more milk if it stiffens before the rice is tender.
- Egg yolksStir the yolks into rice that is cold, not hot, or they will scramble in streaks. Two yolks from modern large eggs are about right for the binding.
- Crumbs, egg and crumbsThe original's sequence gives the beaten egg a dry surface to grip and then seals the mixture under a second crumb coat; the book does not explain its reasoning. Use fine dry breadcrumbs, not panko, and let the breaded nests rest 15 minutes so the coating sets.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives no fat temperature, only "deep fat." Use 375F; below about 360F the croquettes drink oil and split, above about 390F the crumbs brown before the inside heats through. Fry two or three at a time and bring the fat back to temperature between batches.
- Hollow downwardFrying the nests mouth-down keeps the depression from collapsing and stops fat pooling inside. Two to three minutes is enough; they are already cooked and only need color.
- Brown paperGrocers' paper was the standard drain of the period. Paper towels or a wire rack over a tray do the same job, and a rack keeps the crust from steaming.
- The jellyCurrant jelly was a common choice in American cookbooks of this era; the recipe itself simply says "jelly," and any firm, tart jelly cut in small cubes works. Fill only at the moment of serving, or the jelly melts into the hot crust.
- YieldAbout eight to ten nests, serving four as a sweet entrée in the period sense or as a dessert course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, belongs to the Boston Cooking School tradition of precise cups and level spoonfuls, and this recipe is a textbook example of the croquette habit that ran through American cooking around 1900. Croquettes were a way of turning a cooked, bound mixture into something that looked composed on a plate, and cookbooks of the period often carry a run of them: chicken, salmon, sweetbread, hominy, and sweet ones like this. The sweet-savory placement is worth noting - in Edwardian menu order an entrée was simply the course between fish and roast, so a sugared rice croquette filled with currant jelly could sit there without contradiction. The nest shape, filled at the table, reflects a taste for small architectural conceits in service; the same impulse produced timbales, ramekin cases, and pastry vol-au-vents in the same books.