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Savory Rice Cutlets
3 1/2 ounces of rice 1 pint of milk 4 ounces of onion 1/2 pound of bread crumbs Salad oil Pepper and salt 1 heaping tablespoon chopped parsley Peel, and slice the onions, throw them into cold water, let them boil up quickly; then drain, and mince them. Put the rice into a double pan, boil the milk, pour it over the rice, and add the minced onion. Let it cook until the rice has absorbed all the milk, which will take quite two hours. Turn the mixture into a bowl, and let it get nearly cold. Now stir the chopped parsley into the cooled rice, and season with pepper and salt. Take a tablespoon of the mixture, and cover it with bread crumbs. Shape into cutlets an inch thick, and put them into the frying basket. Fry in boiling oil a rich brown, and garnish with parsley. The cutlets are rather difficult to form, and a little patience is necessary to make them a success; but they quite repay one for the trouble when they are finished.
A rice croquette in cutlet dress, and the original is honest that shaping is the hard part. Almost everything that can go wrong here comes down to how cold and how stiff the rice is before it meets the crumbs.
- Chill it properly"Nearly cold" is the hinge. The recipe asks only that the mixture cool nearly cold before shaping; chilling it until firm and stiff makes the shaping easier, since warm rice paste will not hold a cutlet an inch thick.
- The measures3 1/2 ounces of rice is a scant half cup of white rice; the recipe does not specify the grain, and short- or medium-grain will give the stickiest result. The pint is probably the Imperial 20 fl oz, about 2 1/3 US cups. Four ounces of onion is roughly one medium onion.
- Double panA double pan is a double boiler. Two hours over water is not an exaggeration at that gentle heat, but a heavy saucepan over the lowest burner, stirred often, will get the rice to the same thick, sticky, risotto-past-risotto state in 40 to 50 minutes.
- Why the onions are boiled firstThrowing sliced onion into cold water, bringing it up to a boil and draining strips out the raw sulphurous bite. Skipping it leaves a harsh onion note in a very mild dish.
- The breadcrumbsHalf a pound is coating, not binder — far more than you will use, but a generous bed makes rolling the soft mixture possible. Use dry fine crumbs, not fresh. There is no egg in the recipe, so the crust is fragile; a beaten egg between two crumb coats holds far better if you are willing to depart from the text.
- Salad oil and "boiling oil"Salad oil in period usage most often meant olive oil, though seed oils were also sold under the name; any neutral frying oil will serve. Oil does not boil at frying heat; the phrase means hot enough to sizzle briskly, around 350-375F. Below that the cutlets soak and disintegrate.
- Skip the frying basketSoft crumbed cutlets weld to a wire basket. Lower them individually with a spider or slotted spoon, fry two or three at a time, and leave them undisturbed until the crust sets.
- YieldHard to pin down: at the recipe's tablespoon of mixture per cutlet, the full quantity would make a dozen or more small cutlets. They are mild, and take well to a sharp sauce, tomato or a mustard-spiked white sauce.
Meatless cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leaned heavily on the cutlet: a soft farinaceous mixture — rice, lentils, breadcrumbs, cheese, nuts — bound, crumbed, fried and sometimes served with a paper frill on the end, as though it had a chop bone. The shape did a lot of work. Vegetarian households, whether motivated by the food-reform movement, religious conviction or Lenten and fast-day observance, were cooking within a dining culture where the centre of the plate was expected to look like meat, and the cutlet form let a rice croquette occupy that place without comment. This particular version is essentially a stiff milk-cooked rice, close kin to the rice croquettes of Italian and French cookery, seasoned with nothing more assertive than onion, parsley and pepper. The author's frank admission that the things are difficult to form is characteristic of the better books in this genre.