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Rice Fritters
1 cup rice 2 eggs 1 tablespoon sugar 1 pint milk 2 tablespoons butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Boil rice in milk until soft and all milk is absorbed, then remove. Add yolks of eggs, sugar and butter. When cold, add whites whipped to dry froth. Drop by spoonfuls in hot fat and fry light brown.
NOTE-Oatmeal, wheat, farina or any cereal can be frittered as rice is, in above recipe. 1 cup sugar 2 egg yolks, well beaten 2 egg whites, beaten stiff 4 cups flour
A straightforward milk-boiled rice batter dropped into deep fat. Two things in the printed text need sorting out before you start: the milk-to-rice ratio, and the four stray lines at the end.
- The stray ingredient listThe final four lines — 1 cup sugar, 2 egg yolks, 2 egg whites, 4 cups flour — are the opening of a different recipe that has run on into this one. They play no part in the fritters; ignore them entirely.
- Rice and milkOne cup of raw rice to one pint (2 cups) of milk is a close ratio; expect a lid, low heat and roughly 20 minutes for it to absorb fully. Use a heavy pan and stir often — milk scorches on the bottom long before the rice softens. Short or medium grain rice will give a stickier, more cohesive mass than long grain.
- Butter and sugar go in hotAdd the yolks, sugar and butter while the rice is still steaming so the butter melts through and the yolks set slightly into the starch. Then cool completely before folding in the whites, as the instruction says — hot rice would deflate them at once.
- "Dry froth"Period language for whites beaten to stiff peaks, just short of the grainy, separating stage. Fold rather than stir; the air is the only leavening in this batter.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only 'hot fat'. For fritters of this kind, fat somewhere around 360-375F suits: cooler and they soak, hotter and the outside browns before the interior heats through. A cube of bread browning in about a minute is the older test of roughly this heat.
- ShapingThe mixture is thick enough to hold a spoonful. Drop small — a rounded tablespoon — and fry only a few at a time, since a crowded pan drops the fat temperature sharply.
- The cereal noteThe suggested substitutions all work on the same principle: a cooked porridge stiff enough to hold its shape. Farina and oatmeal both need cooking until quite thick, thicker than you would serve for breakfast, or the fritters will spread and break apart in the fat.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; expect a couple of dozen or more small fritters, depending on the size of the spoonfuls. Drain on paper and serve hot; sugar, syrup, jam or a fruit sauce suit a sweetened batter of this kind.
Rice fritters belong to a large family of "made-over" dishes built on cooked cereal, a thrifty way of turning leftover porridge or boiled rice into something worth serving at the end of a meal. The note that oatmeal, wheat, farina or any cereal will do the same job is the real point of the entry: it is a formula rather than a single dish, of a sort that let a household use whatever was in the storeroom. Rice boiled in milk with sugar and eggs is essentially rice pudding, and the fritter is that pudding sent to the fat kettle instead of the oven. Deep frying at home was ordinary work, done in a heavy pot of lard or drippings, which is why the recipe feels no need to say what fat to use or how hot to make it.