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Tomatoes with Rice
Mix a cup of boiled rice with half a cup of stewed tomatoes which have been well seasoned with butter, salt, paprika and onion juice. Put in a saucepan and heat until the rice and tomato are well blended.
A five-minute skillet dish from the meatless-cookery tradition, where rice and tomato stood in for a meat course. The proportions are dry by modern taste, so treat the half cup of tomato as a starting point.
- YieldA cup of cooked rice with a half cup of tomato serves one as a main or two as a side. Scale up by keeping the 2:1 rice-to-tomato ratio, or go closer to 1:1 if you want it looser and more pilaf-like.
- Stewed tomatoesHere this most likely means tomatoes stewed down with butter and seasoning until thick, rather than the canned product sold under that name today, though canned tomatoes were already in wide use when this was written. Half a can (about 7 oz) of diced or crushed tomatoes reduced in butter until thick gives roughly the right consistency.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: a halved onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth, yielding onion flavor without visible pieces. A teaspoon of grated onion, or a quarter of a small onion softened in the butter first, does the same work.
- Season the tomato, not the riceThe instruction to season the tomatoes "well" before combining is the hinge. Once the rice absorbs the liquid there is nothing left to carry salt, so the tomato has to arrive already assertive.
- RiceLong-grain cooked until just done and cooled slightly holds its shape best. Freshly boiled, still-steaming rice will break down into something closer to a porridge as you stir.
- HeatingTwo or three minutes over medium heat, folding rather than stirring hard, is enough to blend. Longer only dries the mixture and dulls the paprika.
- PaprikaPaprika was often valued in American cookbooks of this period for the colour it gave as much as for its heat. A sweet paprika is the safer reading here; smoked paprika will take the dish somewhere else entirely.
Meatless cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not written for vegetarians alone. They served Lenten and Friday abstinence, invalid cookery, wartime economy, and the health-reform movement that ran through American kitchens from Graham onward. Where a dish like tomatoes with rice was grouped with meat substitutes, it reflects a nutritional logic since abandoned: a hot, savory, starchy dish placed at the center of the plate was thought to answer the same appetite as a chop, whatever its protein content. Butter and paprika do much of the work here, and paprika was a fashionable addition to American recipes in this period, prized for the warm red it lent to pale foods like rice, cream sauces and deviled eggs.