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Rice and Cheese No. 2
4 ounces of rice 6 ounces cheese 1 1/2 pints milk Pepper and salt Wash the rice, and put it in a double saucepan with the milk, let it simmer for three hours until all the milk is absorbed, then add the cheese, cut into small pieces, let it cook for another quarter of an hour, then turn into a pie dish, sprinkle a few grated rusk crumbs over, and serve at once.
A plain milk-simmered rice with cheese stirred through at the end. The method is sound but the timing belongs to a coal range, and the measurements are imperial.
- Imperial pintsThis is a British book, so 1 1/2 pints means 30 fl oz, about 850 ml, not the 24 fl oz an American cup measure would give. The 4 oz of rice is by weight, roughly 115 g, or a little over half a cup of long-grain.
- Double saucepanA double saucepan is a double boiler: a bowl or inner pan over simmering water, never in direct contact with the burner. It is what allows the three-hour simmer without the milk catching. A heavy pan over the lowest possible heat, stirred often, is the nearest substitute.
- Three hoursThat is a genuine slow-cooked rice pudding texture rather than a pilaf, and the long steeping is the point: the grains break down and thicken the milk into something creamy. Over direct heat you can get most of the way there in well under an hour, though the result is looser and less silky; a low covered oven is another route, but note the recipe itself never goes near an oven.
- The cheeseSix ounces to four of rice is a heavy proportion. The recipe specifies only "cheese"; a firm English cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire is the likely intention, grated or diced. The recipe gives it a further quarter of an hour, which in a double saucepan is gentle enough; over direct heat, add it off the heat or with the pan barely warm, or it will go grainy and weep fat.
- Rusk crumbsRusk is twice-baked bread, dry and hard, grated to a coarse sandy crumb. Dried breadcrumbs or panko browned for a minute in a dry pan give the same effect, since nothing here goes under a grill.
- SeasoningBetter to salt the milk at the start than at the end; rice seasoned only after cooking tends to taste of surface salt rather than seasoned grain. Go easy given the volume of cheese.
- YieldServes three or four as a supper dish. It sets firm as it cools, so the instruction to serve at once is not decoration.
Meatless cookery books of this kind proliferated in Britain around the First World War, when meat was scarce and expensive and households were being urged, both by the food economy campaigns and by an older vegetarian movement, to find protein elsewhere; whether this particular book belongs to that moment is a matter of inference rather than record. Cheese was the obvious answer, and a whole genre of cheese-and-starch dishes followed: macaroni cheese, cheese pudding, cheese and lentil savouries, and rice combinations like this one, numbered because the book offers several variations. The reliance on a double saucepan and a three-hour cook is telling, and suggests a kitchen in which long slow cooking was unremarkable. The dish sits somewhere between a savoury rice pudding and a risotto without the stock, and its ancestry is really that of the English milk pudding, turned savoury by the addition of cheese and pepper.