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Rice Pies
Use leftover rice like pastry or biscuit dough for both under and upper crusts of various meat or vegetable pies, thus:
Line well greased frying pan or baking dish with well packed rice. Fill with mixed vegetables or a meat hash, adding a little gravy. Cover with more rice, and bake 1/2 hour.
A frugal outdoor-cooking trick: cooked rice packed into a pan does the work of pastry. The original assumes you know the oven and that the filling is already cooked, so both need stating.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 375F for the half hour specified, which is enough to set the rice and brown the top crust. In a covered Dutch oven over coals, aim for a moderate bed above and below rather than direct flame.
- The filling must already be cookedThirty minutes only heats the pie through and firms the rice; it will not cook raw meat or hard root vegetables. Use a finished hash, stew meat, or vegetables already tender, and add the gravy warm.
- Which rice holds togetherShort- or medium-grain rice, slightly overcooked and still a little sticky, packs into a crust. Cold long-grain or converted rice stays loose and will crumble; bind it with a beaten egg per two cups if that is all you have.
- Packing the crustPress the rice firmly up the sides, about a half inch thick, with the back of a wet spoon. Grease the pan generously, including the sides, or the crust welds to the metal.
- Leftover rice handlingCooked rice held warm for hours is the classic medium for Bacillus cereus. Cool it quickly, refrigerate, and use within a day or two; on a camping trip that means an actual cold box, not a shaded pack.
- Top crustA rice lid will not puff or seal like pastry. Dot it with butter or brush with drippings before baking so it browns and crisps rather than drying to a chalky layer.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities or pan size. As a rough working guide, about three cups of cooked rice and two to three cups of filling will fill a 9-inch pan and serve four. Let it stand ten minutes before cutting or the slices collapse.
Rice as a crust belongs to the long tradition of stretching a meal with whatever starch is already cooked, and the same logic turns up in camp and institutional cookery and in Depression-era home manuals: the pan, the fuel and the leftovers were all you had. Rice suits outdoor cooking because it travels dry, keeps well, and cooks in one pot over a fire, so a party carrying it is likely to have some left over. The technique is a cousin of the potato-topped shepherd's pie and of the rice-lined molds sometimes called a border of rice in older service cookery, where the grain was pressed into a ring and the ragout spooned into the middle.