Brown Stock
Canned pimentoes Melt butter in hot frying-pan, add rice, and stir constantly until rice is well browned. Add stock heated to boiling-point, and cook in double boiler until soft. Turn on a serving dish, garnish with pimentoes cut in fancy shapes, and cover with Creole Sauce. Cook two tablespoons chopped onion, two tablespoons chopped green pepper, one tablespoon chopped red pepper, or canned pimentoes, and four tablespoons chopped fresh mushrooms, with three tablespoons butter, five minutes. Add two tablespoons flour, one cup tomatoes, one truffle thinly sliced, one-fourth cup sherry wine, and salt to taste.
A browned-rice dish finished with a mushroom-and-tomato Creole sauce. The quantities for the rice itself are not stated in the text as it stands, so work from proportion rather than from the page.
- Working proportionsFor browned rice of this type, allow about 1 cup long-grain rice, 2 to 3 tablespoons butter, and 2 to 2 1/2 cups hot stock. The original does not give these figures, so treat them as a starting point and add more hot stock if the grains are still firm.
- Brown the rice properlyThis is the hinge of the dish. Dry rice in hot butter should be stirred without pause until the grains are the color of a hazelnut shell; that toasting is the whole flavor. Rice scorches in seconds once it starts to color, so keep the pan moving and pull it off heat the moment it is right.
- Hot stock, not coldThe recipe specifies stock heated to boiling-point before it goes onto the browned rice. Keeping the liquid hot means the cooking is not interrupted when it is added.
- Double boiler timingRice steamed over water takes considerably longer than the 18 minutes or so it needs in a covered saucepan; allow upwards of 40 minutes and test the grains. A heavy lidded pan on the lowest burner gives a similarly gentle result in less time.
- Truffle and sherryTruffles turn up fairly often in cookbooks of this period, though they were still an expensive imported ingredient. A tablespoon of truffle oil is not a substitute; leaving it out entirely is more honest. Use a dry sherry, not cream sherry.
- Canned pimientosThese are sweet red peppers, roasted and peeled, packed in brine or their own juice. Drain and pat dry before cutting into shapes or the sauce will thin.
- The sauce needs simmeringAs written, the flour and tomatoes are added and the recipe stops. Cook the sauce another 10 minutes after the tomatoes go in, so the flour loses its raw taste and the sauce coats a spoon.
- YieldA cup of raw rice with this sauce serves four as a side dish, three as a light main course.
Browning rice in fat before adding hot stock is the technique behind pilaf, Spanish rice and Creole rice alike, and it likely reached American cookbooks by more than one route. The Creole sauce here, with its green and red peppers, mushrooms, tomato and sherry, reads as a tidy schoolroom rendering of a New Orleans idea: measured to the tablespoon, softened with butter, and finished with a truffle to signal that this is company food. Canned pimientos, offered as an equal alternative to fresh red pepper, suggest something about the date: Spanish canned pimientos were imported in the 1890s and domestic US canning followed in the 1910s.