Home › Entrées › Rice Croustades
Rice Croustades
Wash one cup rice, and steam in White Stock. Cool, and mix with three-fourths cup Thick White Sauce, to which has been added beaten yolk of one egg, slight grating of nutmeg, one-half teaspoon salt, and one-eighth teaspoon pepper. Spread mixture in buttered pan two inches thick, cover with buttered paper, and place weight on top. Let stand until cold. Turn from pan, cut in rounds, remove centres, leaving cases; dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs, and fry in deep fat. Fill with creamed fish.
Soufflé au Rhum Yolks 2 eggs ¼ cup powdered sugar Few grains salt 1 tablespoon rum Whites 4 eggs Beat yolks of eggs until lemon-colored. Add sugar, salt, and rum. Cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. Butter a hot omelet pan, pour in one-half mixture, brown underneath, fold gradually, turn on a hot serving dish, and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Cook remaining mixture in same way. Soufflé au Rhum should be slightly underdone inside. At gentlemen's dinners rum is sometimes poured around soufflé and lighted when sent to table. Omelet Soufflé Yolks 2 eggs 1/4 cup powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Whites 4 eggs Few grains salt Prepare same as Soufflé au Rhum. Mound three-fourths of mixture on a slightly buttered platter. Decorate mound with remaining mixture forced through a pastry bag and tube. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, and bake ten minutes in a moderate oven.
A savory croustade made from pressed, enriched rice rather than bread or pastry oward filled and fried. The whole thing depends on getting the rice mixture stiff and thoroughly chilled before it is cut.
- White StockFarmer's White Stock is a pale veal or veal-and-fowl stock, mild in flavour. A light chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily herbed, since the point is a neutral background, and go easy on salt because the mixture is seasoned separately.
- Steaming the riceReckon on roughly two cups of stock to the cup of raw rice, adjusting as needed. A short- or medium-grain rice gives a stickier mixture that is easier to cut, though the sauce and yolk are doing most of the binding.
- Thick White SauceThe stiffest of the graded white sauces in the book, with a far higher proportion of butter and flour to milk than the thin sauce (on the order of a quarter cup of each to a cup of milk), giving a paste that holds its shape. A thinner sauce will not bind the rice.
- The egg yolkStir the beaten yolk into the sauce off the heat, as the recipe directs, then mix with the cooled rice. The yolk helps hold the cases together in the fat.
- Pressing and chillingTwo inches deep in a buttered pan, buttered paper on the surface, and a weight on top a second pan with a few cans in it does the job. Refrigerate several hours or overnight; anything less than fully cold will slump when cut and break apart in the fryer.
- Cutting the casesA round cutter of about 2 1/2 inches for the outside and a 1 1/2 inch cutter or a small knife for the hollow, leaving a floor about half an inch thick. Chill the cut cases again before breading.
- Crumb, egg, crumbDry fine crumbs first, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again. The first coat of crumbs gives the egg something to grip on a damp surface. Let the breaded cases rest 20 minutes so the coating sets.
- Deep fat375"F. The period test is a cube of bread browning in 40 seconds. Fry a few at a time so the temperature holds, drain on paper, and fill just before serving or the cases soften.
- Yield and fillingThe recipe gives no yield; a cup of rice pressed a full two inches deep covers only a small pan and will cut into a handful of cases, with trimmings left over. Creamed fish means flaked cooked fish in a medium white sauce, seasoned and served hot.
Croustade is generally traced to the same Latin root as crust, and in nineteenth-century service it meant any edible container ofried bread, a pastry shell, or as here a shaped and fried starch paste holding a creamed mixture. Fannie Farmer's entr"e chapter is full of these constructions because the formal dinner of the 1890s expected a course between the fish and the roast that was small, hot, and handsome on the plate. Building the case out of leftover rice bound with a thick white sauce is the economical version of the trick: the kitchen labor is considerable but the ingredients cost almost nothing, which is very much the Boston Cooking School's temperament.