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Rice Timbale
This timbale is made in the same way as the preceding one, only substituting rice for macaroni. One-half cup of rice.
This is a one-line variation, not a standalone recipe: everything but the quantity of rice is borrowed from the macaroni timbale printed above it. What follows is what a modern cook needs to fill in the gaps.
- Read the preceding recipe firstThe method, filling, mould and baking time all come from the macaroni timbale that immediately precedes this entry. Without it this is only a substitution note, and any attempt to guess the base recipe will not resemble what the author meant.
- What a timbale meant hereIn Italian and Anglo-American cookery of this period a timballo was generally a lined mould: pasta or rice packed against the sides of a buttered, crumbed deep mould, a savoury filling in the centre, a lid of the same starch on top, baked and turned out. It is a different thing from the small individual moulded timbale of French service.
- Half a cup of riceAlmost certainly dry, uncooked rice, and a small quantity: half a cup should give something like a cup and a half cooked, enough to line and cap only a small mould. Scale up with the mould rather than the appetite.
- Which riceA starchy medium- or short-grain rice (arborio or vialone nano; carnaroli is a later variety but works) gives the starch that helps the shell hold together when the mould is inverted. Long-grain rice binds less well and is likelier to crumble unless egg and cheese are added.
- Cook the rice short of doneThe rice goes into the oven and cooks further there. Boil or simmer it until just tender but still firm at the centre, drain well, and let the steam escape before moulding; wet rice will not set.
- Lining the mouldButter the mould generously and dust it with fine dry breadcrumbs. Press the rice firmly in an even layer, no more than half an inch thick, and pack the top layer down hard so the seam closes.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction; follow the macaroni timbale it refers to. Where such books call for a moderate oven, modern editions usually read that as somewhere around 350F. Bake until set and lightly coloured, then let the mould rest five to ten minutes before turning it out, or the shell will tear.
- Binding, if it is missing from the base recipeEgg and grated cheese are a common binder in rice timballi, and will help the shell set. If the macaroni version relies on cheese and egg for its structure, the rice will want the same.
Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was written by Antonia Isola, the pen name of Mabel Earl McGinnis, and belongs to a small wave of early twentieth-century books that presented Italian home cooking to American readers in plain, unfussy terms. Its brevity is characteristic: recipes run to a few lines and lean on the one before, a habit it shares with Italian manuals like Pellegrino Artusi's, where variations are noted rather than rewritten. The dish itself, the timballo, is far older and grander than this note suggests — in nineteenth-century Neapolitan cooking it was a showpiece, a pastry or pasta drum enclosing meats, offal and sauce, served at feasts and famously described in Italian fiction. Reducing it to half a cup of rice is exactly the sort of domestication these books performed: an aristocratic form shrunk to something a single household cook could manage on a weeknight.