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English Rice
1/2 cup rice. 1/2 cup pecans. Dash of pepper 1/2 cup cooked tomatoes 1 saltspoon salt Wash, boil and drain the rice. Strain the tomatoes and add to them the seasoning. Put a layer of rice in the bottom of a baking dish, then a layer of nuts, then rice, then nuts again until the entire quantity is used, making the last layer of rice. Pour the tomatoes over this and bake in a moderate oven thirty minutes.
A plain baked casserole of rice layered with chopped nuts and bound with seasoned tomato. The quantities that survive are only the seasonings, so treat the proportions below as a working reconstruction.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Thirty minutes is enough to heat through and set the top layer, since the rice goes in already cooked.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A dash of pepper is a pinch, perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Working proportionsFor a dish this size, about 2 cups cooked rice and 1 cup chopped nuts, with the half cup of strained tomato given, will fill a small casserole and serve three or four. The tomato is a seasoning layer, not a sauce that will submerge the rice.
- The nutsThe recipe does not name a nut; walnuts or pecans are plausible choices. Chop coarsely rather than grinding. Toasting them briefly before layering keeps them from going soft and flat under the tomato.
- Strain the tomatoesStraining here means pressing the cooked tomato through a sieve to remove skins and seeds; the seasoned pulp and juice are then poured over the dish. Very watery tomato will soften the top layer of rice.
- Boil and drain the riceCook the rice slightly firm. It will absorb the tomato in the oven, and rice boiled soft first will come out pasty.
- FinishingWith the last layer of rice exposed under only a little tomato, the top dries. Cover for the first twenty minutes and uncover for the last ten, or dot the surface with butter.
The dish sits in a "Meat Substitutes" chapter, which places it squarely in the early twentieth-century American interest in nut cookery. Nuts were promoted then both by vegetarian reformers, who valued them as a protein food, and by wartime and thrift campaigns urging households to eat less meat; layered nut-and-grain bakes appeared in household manuals of the period. The name "English Rice" is not explained in the book, and no established English dish appears to correspond to it, though that is hard to verify; national labels in loose-leaf and community cookbooks are often said to have signalled little more than plainness or a supposed origin picked up secondhand.