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Rice and Tomatoes
4 ounces of rice 1 pint of milk 1/2 pound of tomatoes 1 ounce of butter Pepper and salt to taste Pick over the rice, and simmer in the milk until perfectly soft; then add seasonings. Peel the tomatoes, and cut them up taking out all hard parts, and bake them in a shallow dish in the oven. When cooked, beat them into the rice, add the butter, and serve very hot.
A plain milk-simmered rice with baked tomato beaten through it, from the era when "meatless cookery" meant Lenten and economy cooking rather than vegetarianism as a creed. Two small things decide whether it works: the rice must go soft in milk without scorching, and the tomatoes must be baked down rather than stewed wet.
- Weights to volumes4 ounces of rice is a scant 2/3 cup; 1/2 pound of tomatoes is one large or two medium; 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. A pint here is the US pint, 2 cups, if you are working from an American printing.
- Rice in milk scorchesMilk catches on the bottom of the pan far more readily than water. Use a heavy pan, the lowest possible heat, and stir often, or set the pan over a water bath. A short or medium grain rice gives the creamy result the recipe assumes; long-grain basmati will not thicken the same way.
- "Pick over the rice"Nineteenth-century rice arrived with grit, husk and the odd stone. Modern packaged rice needs nothing but a rinse, and if you want the milk to thicken you can skip even that.
- Oven for the tomatoesThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'bake them in the oven' in a shallow dish. Around 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the tomatoes have collapsed and the liquid has largely gone, will do it. Baking rather than stewing drives off water so the finished dish is not soupy.
- PeelingScore the skins and dip in boiling water for 20 seconds, then slip them off. "All hard parts" means the core and the pale fibrous shoulders.
- Season late and season firmlyMilk-cooked rice absorbs a great deal of salt. Taste after the tomatoes are beaten in, since their acidity changes what the dish needs, and be more generous with pepper than you expect.
- YieldTwo as a light main course, four as a side. It sets stiff as it cools, so serve it straight from the pan as directed.
Meatless cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries treated dishes like this as a main course not because rice resembles meat but because it sat where the meat would have sat on the plate: the bulk of the meal, carrying the protein of the milk. Rice cooked in milk was long familiar in British and American kitchens as a nursery and invalid food, and the tomato is what marks this version as modern for its time. Tomatoes are often said to have been shaking off an older reputation as suspect at the start of the nineteenth century, and they only became an everyday cooked vegetable in English-speaking households over the course of it; by the time this book was printed a half-pound of them was an unremarkable thing to have in the house.