Home › Meat Substitutes › Baked Rice and Cheese No. 2
Baked Rice and Cheese No. 2
1/4 pound of cheese grated or cut into small pieces 1 cup of rice Milk as needed Cook the rice; put into a buttered baking dish alternate layers of rice and cheese; pour over them enough milk to come halfway to the top of the rice; cover with buttered crumbs and brown.
A plain layered casserole from the meat-substitute chapter, written for cooks who needed no telling how long to boil rice. Two things need filling in: the rice quantity and the oven.
- Rice quantityOne cup of raw rice, cooked, yields roughly three cups and fills a 1.5-quart dish adequately. If you read it as one cup of already-cooked rice, halve the cheese and use a smaller dish.
- Oven heatThe recipe says only "brown," with no oven term or time given. Everything is already cooked, so the bake is just to heat through and colour the crumbs: a hot oven, in the region of 400F, for twenty minutes or so will do it. A slower oven will take longer to take colour.
- The cheeseA quarter pound is 4 oz, about a cup grated. The recipe does not specify a type; a firm cheese of the plain factory-cheddar sort suits it best. Avoid anything very fresh or very high-moisture, which will weep rather than bind.
- Milk levelMilk only halfway up the rice is deliberate. The rice is already cooked and will not absorb much more; a full flooding leaves you with soup. Whole milk gives a better set than skim.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1/2 cup crumbs to 1 tablespoon butter. Fresh soft crumbs will steam instead of crisping.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt the rice water and season each layer, or the dish reads flat; a grating of nutmeg or a little dry mustard with the cheese is period-appropriate.
- YieldRoughly four small servings, or six as a side. Best straight from the oven, as the cheese firms on standing.
Meatless cookery of the early twentieth century leaned hard on cheese, eggs and milk to supply the protein that meat would otherwise have provided, and rice-and-cheese bakes of this kind are common in such books. Rice was cheap and shelf-stable, and grown domestically in the American South; cheese was among the few concentrated animal proteins a household could buy in small amounts and keep without ice. Books of this kind were aimed at overlapping audiences: religious vegetarians, health reformers in the Kellogg mould, and ordinary families economising. The "No. 2" in the title is most likely the compiler's way of numbering variant recipes on the same theme, a common habit in compiled cookbooks.