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Rice a La Creole
1 cup chopped boiled or raw ham 1 onion 1 cup boiled rice 1 can tomatoes 2 cups fine soft crumbs 2 tablespoons butter or other fat Celery-salt Pepper and salt Mix ingredients in the order given. Bake in a greased casserole for one-half hour (350 degrees F.). This dish makes a good one-dish meal.
A plain baked rice-and-tomato dish from the era when "casserole" had just shifted from meaning the pot to meaning the supper. A few of the quantities need pinning down before you start.
- The can of tomatoesIn this period a recipe calling for "1 can tomatoes" means the No. 2 can, about 20 oz or 2 1/2 cups, juice included. A standard 14.5 oz can is smaller; use one and a half, or a 28 oz can drained of about a cup of liquid.
- Chop the onionThe list says only "1 onion." It goes in raw and only gets thirty minutes in the oven, so chop it fine or it may still be crunchy. A medium yellow onion is about the right scale for this amount of rice.
- Raw ham"Raw ham" here means uncooked cured pork, not fresh pork loin. Cut it small, no more than 1/2 inch, so it reaches 145F in the half hour. If you use boiled ham, it is already cooked and only needs heating.
- Soft crumbs, not dry"Fine soft crumbs" are torn from the inside of a day-old loaf, not the sandy dry crumb sold in canisters. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will leave the dish stiff and pasty.
- OvenThe 350F given in the original is what a modern oven means by moderate, so take it at face value. Uncovered for the full half hour gives a browned top; cover for the first 20 minutes if the crumbs colour too fast.
- The fatTwo tablespoons for six-odd cups of mixture is lean by current taste. Dot it over the surface rather than mixing it through if you want the crumb top to crisp.
- Celery salt and seasoningCelery salt is still sold and still does the work here; it is the dish's only real aromatic besides the onion. Salt with a light hand until you know how salty the ham is.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number, but the volume suggests four as the one-dish meal it is billed as, or six alongside a green salad.
"A la Creole" on American menus of the 1920s and 30s was commonly shorthand for tomato and onion, a much-diluted echo of New Orleans cooking; in a recipe like this one it means little more than "with tomatoes." The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Delineator, a Butterick magazine, and this dish follows a pattern common in casserole cookery of the period: a starch already boiled, a cup of cooked meat, a can of something, crumbs on top, one pan to wash.