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Baked Rice and Cheese No. 1
1 cup of uncooked rice and 4 cups milk or 3 cups cooked rice and 1 cup of milk 2 tablespoons flour 1/2 pound cheese 1/2 teaspoon salt If uncooked rice is used, it should be cooked in three cups of milk. Make a sauce with one cup of milk, add the flour, cheese and salt. Into a buttered baking dish put alternate layers of the cooked rice and the sauce. Cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until the crumbs are brown.
A straightforward rice gratin from the meat-substitute chapter, written for cooks who needed no hand-holding. A few of its silences are worth filling.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the recipe assumes a range oven judged by hand. Bake at 375F; the dish is already cooked through, so you are only browning the crumbs and heating the whole, roughly 20-25 minutes.
- The sauce needs fatTwo tablespoons of flour are stirred into a cup of milk with no butter, which will give a thin, slightly floury sauce. A conventional roux of 2 tablespoons butter with the flour, cooked a minute before the milk goes in, gives a smoother result.
- Cheese off the heatHalf a pound of cheese into one cup of milk is a very high ratio, and it will break and turn grainy if boiled. Thicken the milk first, pull the pan off the heat, then stir the grated cheese in until it melts.
- What cheeseAn unqualified 'cheese' in books of this kind usually meant a firm yellow factory cheddar, sometimes called American or store cheese. A sharp cheddar is the closest thing on a modern counter.
- Cooking the rice in milkOne cup of raw rice in three cups of milk scorches easily. Use a heavy pan over low heat, stir often, or set it in a covered dish in the oven. The rice should be tender and the milk absorbed before it is layered.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, about a cup of crumbs to two tablespoons butter. Fresh soft crumbs go soggy rather than brown.
- YieldServes four to six as a main dish. It is rich; a sharp salad or stewed tomatoes alongside is closer to how it would have been served.
Meatless cookery of this era was less about vegetarian principle than about economy. Cheese was the standard stand-in: it was widely available, kept reasonably well, and was promoted in period food literature as a protein equal to meat, an idea that produced a long run of rice-and-cheese, macaroni-and-cheese and bread-and-cheese bakes with almost identical structures. The "No. 1" in the title is a common convention in cookbooks of the time, marking the first of several versions of the same idea printed in sequence. The dish itself is a plain gratin, built on the same white-sauce-and-crumb template that carried most American baked vegetable dishes of the period.