Home › Meat Substitutes › Savory Rice Pudding
Savory Rice Pudding
4 ounces of rice 1/4 pint tomato sauce 2 ounces grated Parmesan 2 ounces breaded crumbs Boil the rice according to recipe for rice boiled for curry. When it is cooked, mix well with the tomato sauce, made according to recipe for tomato sauce. Now put it into a buttered baking dish, and sprinkle over it the grated Parmesan. Cover with bread crumbs, and break the butter into bits, and stew it over the top. Brown in a quick oven, and serve very hot.
A simple baked rice gratin from the meat-substitute chapter, written for cooks who already had boiled rice and tomato sauce in their repertoire. A few conversions and one omission in the original ingredient list are worth sorting out first.
- The missing butterButter appears in the method ("break the butter into bits") but not in the ingredient list. Two tablespoons, cold and diced over the crumbs, is right for this quantity; without it the crumb layer stays pale and dusty.
- "Stew it over the top"A printer's slip for strew. Scatter the butter bits evenly over the crumbed surface rather than doing anything stewlike.
- Quantities in modern terms4 oz rice is a generous half cup uncooked, yielding roughly 2 cups boiled. A quarter pint of sauce is 5 fl oz British measure, so about 2/3 cup. Parmesan and crumbs are 2 oz each, roughly 2/3 cup grated cheese and about 1/2 cup dry crumbs (more if they are coarse or panko-style, which weigh less by volume).
- A quick oven425-450F. The dish is already cooked through, so the oven is only browning the top: 12-15 minutes near the top of the oven, or a few minutes under the broiler if the crumbs are slow to colour.
- Rice boiled for curryThe cross-referenced method is not given here, but rice for curry was usually boiled in plenty of salted water and drained, so the grains stay separate rather than absorbing everything as in a pilaf. Drain well and let it steam dry, or the pudding will slump.
- "Breaded crumbs"Evidently a slip for bread crumbs; the recipe does not say whether fresh or dry, though dry crumbs brown more reliably under butter. Modern panko browns faster than period crumbs, so check at 10 minutes.
- Season itNo salt or pepper is listed, and Parmesan alone will not carry the dish. Taste the rice-and-sauce mixture before it goes into the dish and correct it; a scrape of nutmeg or a pinch of dried oregano is in keeping.
- YieldTwo as a light main course with a green salad, or four as a side. Bake in a shallow dish about 7 inches across so the crumb-to-rice ratio stays high.
Meatless cookery of the early twentieth century leaned heavily on rice and cheese, and dishes like this one sit at the junction of two traditions: the English savoury pudding, a baked dish of grain or batter served as a course in its own right, and the Italian habit of baking rice with tomato and Parmesan. The word "savory" in the title is doing real work, distinguishing it from the sweetened, milk-baked rice pudding that a reader of the period might otherwise have assumed. Hard Italian cheese was an imported and relatively costly item in Britain and America at this date, which makes an allowance of two ounces a substantial one. The reliance on cross-references to other recipes in the same book is common in cookery writing of the period.