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Rice Cake, with Currant Jelly
2 quarts of well cooked dry rice. 6 ounces of butter. 6 ounces of sugar. 6 yolks of eggs. 1/2 pint of milk (or less, or none if the rice be not dry.) Flavor with nutmeg or vanilla.
Mix all the ingredients together, mashing the rice with the spoon. Smooth it over, about an inch deep, in a buttered pan. Bake in a hot oven to get a quick brown on top. Cut out diamonds, squares, or other neat shapes, and serve with red currant jelly placed tastefully on or about the rice cake. Articles like the above ought always be baked in bright tin pans. Iron meat pans, however clean, generally stain the under side and make the cakes uneatable.
A thrifty baked rice pudding cut into shapes and dressed with jelly. The book gives no oven time and no pan size, so the two things to settle before you start are the depth of the batter and how brown you want the top.
- A hot ovenPeriod usage for a brisk oven, generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. The author wants surface colour rather than long cooking, since the rice is already done, so watch the top rather than the clock.
- Two quarts of cooked riceThat is 8 cups cooked, from about 2 1/2 cups raw long-grain. "Well cooked dry" means fully tender but with the grains separate and the surface moisture driven off — day-old rice is ideal.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. The parenthesis is the real instruction: add it only as needed. Wet rice plus a full cup gives a loose mixture that will not cut into clean diamonds.
- Butter and sugar by weight6 ounces of butter is 1 1/2 sticks; 6 ounces of sugar is about 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons. Melt or soften the butter and stir it into the warm rice before the yolks so it disperses.
- The yolksSix yolks into hot rice will scramble if dumped in. Let the rice cool to warm, or slacken the yolks with a little of the milk first, then fold through.
- Pan choice is not a fussy asideThe closing note about bright tin versus iron is the practical hinge. Use a light-coloured aluminium or tinned pan; a dark steel or cast-iron pan will overbrown and toughen the underside long before the top colours. Butter it well.
- Size and yieldThe mixture spread an inch deep will cover roughly 115-145 square inches, so a 9 x 13 pan is about right rather than a half-sheet. Cut into diamonds it gives 16-20 portions.
- ServingCool until firm before cutting, or the shapes tear. Red currant jelly is worth seeking out for its sharpness against the sweet rice; a tart jelly of any kind serves the same purpose.
Baked rice cakes of this sort sit in the long tradition of turning leftover boiled rice into something presentable, since rice was cheap, kept a day or two, and could be enriched with butter and yolks into a dish that carried a fashionable name. Rice moved through nineteenth-century American cookery from the Carolina Lowcountry crop. Currant jelly was the default sweet-tart accompaniment of the period, poured up in quantity each summer and used with meats as readily as with puddings; its clean acidity is doing the same work here that a raspberry coulis would do now. The final paragraph about bright tin against iron meat pans is the voice of someone who has ruined a tray.