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Rice Croquettes
1 cup boiled rice. 1 egg. 1 teaspoon sugar. 1 teaspoon melted butter Salt to taste Cream Beat the egg light; mix with other ingredients, using enough cream to make the rice malleable. Make into croquettes; dip in egg and fine cracker or bread crumbs and stand for several hours in a cold place. Fry in deep fat, very hot,
A standard croquette of cooked rice bound with egg and cream, breaded and deep-fried. The chilling step is not optional — it is what holds the croquette together in the fat.
- The riceThe recipe as printed does not give a rice quantity; the ingredient list is cut short. Cooked, cooled boiled or steamed rice is what is wanted, and leftover rice suits it. Short or medium grain coheres better than a dry long grain such as basmati. As a working guide, about 2 cups cooked rice to the single egg the recipe calls for will make roughly a dozen small croquettes.
- "Malleable"Add cream a spoonful at a time until the rice holds a shape when squeezed and does not crumble or slump. Too much and the croquettes will burst in the fryer. If the mixture goes slack, stiffen it with a little more crumb rather than more rice.
- The several hours in a cold placeThis is the hinge. The recipe wants the formed, breaded croquettes held several hours somewhere cold -- an icebox or cool cellar then, the refrigerator now -- so the coating dries and the interior firms. Frying them warm and soft is a common reason croquettes fall apart.
- Fine crumbsThe recipe allows either, and cracker crumbs give a crisper shell than soft bread crumbs. Whichever you use, sift or roll them fine; coarse crumbs leave gaps the fat gets into.
- "Deep fat, very hot"No temperature is given. In modern terms this means fat around 370-380F: below that the croquettes soak, much above and the crumb browns before the centre is hot. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash, until deep gold, and drain on a rack rather than paper.
- ServingThe recipe says nothing about serving. Rice croquettes of this kind commonly appear as a vegetable course or an accompaniment to poultry or veal, sometimes with a tomato sauce, and sweet versions rolled in sugar and served with jam were made from a similar base.
Croquettes were one of the great economies of the household kitchen: any cooked starch or minced meat, bound with egg and cream and fried, reappeared at table as something that looked deliberate. Rice croquettes turn up constantly in household manuals, which says a good deal about how rice was regarded — not as a grain in its own right so much as a bland, cheap body to be given shape and flavour. The technique is French in origin, the word from croquer, to crunch, and the crust is the entire point; the long chilling before frying is the detail that separates the manuals that had tested their recipes from those that had not.