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Rice Croquettes with Jelly
1/2 cup rice ½ cup boiling water 1 cup scalded milk 1 teaspoon salt Yolks 2 eggs 1 tablespoon butter Wash rice, add to water with salt, cover, and steam until rice has absorbed water. Then add milk, stir lightly with a fork, cover, and steam until rice is soft. Remove from fire, add egg yolks and butter; spread on a shallow plate to cool. Shape in balls, roll in crumbs, then shape in form of nests. Dip in egg, again in crumbs, fry in deep fat, and drain. Put a cube of jelly in each croquette. Arrange on a folded napkin, and garnish with parsley, or serve around game.
A Fannie Farmer croquette of the classic type: starch bound with yolk, chilled hard, breaded twice, and fried. Everything depends on how cold and how dry the rice paste is before it meets the fat.
- Chill, don't just cool"Spread on a shallow plate to cool" means spread thin; cooling it in the refrigerator until genuinely firm is the safest reading. Warm or soft rice paste will burst in the fat and the nests will collapse.
- Steaming the rice"Steam" here need not mean a covered pan on direct heat; period practice often meant a double boiler, though the recipe does not say. Either way the rice should end up sticky and broken down rather than separate-grained, and a short-grain rice will give that tackiness more readily than long-grain.
- Egg yolksStir them in as soon as the pan comes off the heat, while the rice is still hot; they are cooked through in the frying. Off the fire the mixture stiffens quickly, so work fast.
- CrumbsPeriod "crumbs" are dry, fine, sifted stale bread, not panko and not seasoned commercial crumbs. Fine dry crumbs are what let you press the shape into a nest without cracking.
- Deep fat temperaturePeriod frying tests for cooked mixtures like this used a cube of bread browning in about forty seconds; the book gives no thermometer reading. Fry a few at a time; a crowded pot drops the temperature and the croquettes soak.
- Shaping the nestsFollow the recipe's order: roll into balls, crumb them, then press a hollow to form the nest, then egg and crumb a second time. The double coating is not optional here, since the depression is a weak point.
- The jellyProbably currant jelly, though the recipe says only "jelly," and it goes in after frying, into the hot nest, where it slumps slightly. Cut it in small firm cubes straight from the refrigerator.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; half a cup of raw rice makes a small dish, suited to a light entree course or as a garnish around roast game birds. A wire rack over paper does the draining job that the folded napkin was doing.
Croquettes were the workhorse of the American entree course at the turn of the century, and the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes pages to them in rice, chicken, veal, lobster and sweetbread versions. The word comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the technique arrived in American kitchens through the French-trained cookery teaching that Fannie Farmer inherited and standardised. The pairing with currant jelly explains the last line of the recipe: tart red jelly was the fixed accompaniment to venison and game birds in nineteenth-century service, so a rice croquette carrying a cube of it could be set around the platter as both garnish and sauce. That it also works as a small sweet dish on its own is characteristic of the period's "entree" -- a course defined by its position in the meal rather than by being savoury.