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Rice with Tomatoes
Boil a cup of rice soft in hot water. Shake it now and then, but do not stir it. Drain it, add a little milk in which a beaten egg has been mixed, one teaspoon of butter, and a little pepper and salt. Simmer for five minutes, and if the rice has not absorbed all the milk, drain it again. Put the rice around a dish, smooth it into a wall, wash it over with the yolk of a beaten egg, and put it into the oven until firm. Take the strained juice and pulp of seven or eight tomatoes, season with pepper, a little salt and sugar, and one-half of a chopped-up onion; stew for twenty minutes, then stir in one tablespoon of butter and two tablespoons of fine bread crumbs. Stew three or four minutes to thicken, and then pour the tomatoes into the dish, in the middle of the rice, and serve.
Rice with Tomatoes "all' Indiana" Wash a cup of rice and boil it. Take seven or eight good-sized tomatoes, boil and strain them, and season with salt and a little allspice. Take a baking-dish and put into it alternate layers of tomato and rice, finishing off with a layer of tomato, covered up with grated bread crumbs moistened with melted butter. Bake in a moderate oven for a good half-hour.
Two versions of the same idea: a rice border with a tomato filling, and a layered baked version. Neither gives temperatures or yields, and both assume a cook who knows what soft-boiled rice should look like.
- The riceBoiling in plenty of water and draining is the method here, not absorption. An ordinary medium-grain or long-grain rice works; Arborio and other risotto rices will turn gluey when boiled soft and then simmered again in milk. "Soft" means genuinely tender, since the grains have to hold a shaped wall without crunch.
- Do not stirThe instruction to shake but not stir is the hinge of the first version. Stirring boiling rice breaks the grains and releases starch, and the border will slump rather than stand.
- Oven temperatureThe first version states none; the second calls for a moderate oven, generally taken as somewhere around 350F/175C in books of this period. The rice wall only needs long enough for the egg glaze to set and firm, roughly 10-15 minutes; the layered version takes its stated half-hour.
- The egg in the milkA beaten egg in "a little milk" — call it a third to a half cup — poured over hot rice and simmered five minutes makes a light custard binding. Keep the heat low and move the pan constantly off the burner or the egg will curdle into threads.
- TomatoesSeven or eight tomatoes means ripe summer fruit, around 2 lb / 900 g. Out of season, a 28 oz can of whole peeled tomatoes, drained of its thinnest liquid and passed through a sieve, is closer to the intent than watery fresh ones.
- Breadcrumbs as thickenerThe tablespoon of butter and two of fine crumbs stirred into the stewed tomato at the end is a thickening step, not a topping. Use dry fine crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and give them the three or four minutes stated so they swell and lose their raw taste.
- Shaping the wallPack the rice against the sides of a shallow buttered gratin dish while it is still hot and pliable, using the back of a wet spoon. Once cooled it will not smooth.
- YieldA cup of dry rice with the tomato sauce serves three or four as a light main dish, or four to six alongside something else.
This comes from Simple Italian Cookery by Antonia Isola, published in the United States in 1912. The rice border filled with a sauce, sometimes called a bordura di riso, was one way of dressing a plain grain for the table, and the egg-yolk wash that sets in the oven is the same trick used on pastry. The second version, labelled "all' Indiana," may reflect the period's loose habit of attaching "Indian" to a dish carrying a warm spice; here it is nothing more exotic than allspice, and the dish is essentially a tomato and rice gratin. Tomatoes in quantity, cheap rice and a crust of buttered crumbs made this the kind of economical meatless supper that appears elsewhere in the book.