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Rice à la Riston
Finely chop two thin slices bacon, add to one-half raw medium-sized cabbage, finely chopped; cover, and cook slowly thirty minutes. Add one-fourth cup rice, boiled, one-half teaspoon chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Moisten with one-half cup White Stock, and cook fifteen minutes.
Turkish Pilaf I Wash and drain one-half cup rice, cook in one tablespoon butter until brown, add one cup boiling water, and steam until water is absorbed. Add one and three-fourths cups hot stewed tomatoes, cook until rice is soft, and season with salt and pepper.
Two separate recipes have run together in this excerpt: a cabbage-and-rice skillet dish and, beginning at "Turkish Pilaf I," an unrelated tomato pilaf. Treat them as two dishes.
- The hinge: low and coveredThe cabbage cooks thirty minutes covered with nothing but two slices of chopped bacon. There is no added liquid, so the heat must be genuinely low and the lid tight, or the cabbage scorches in the rendered fat before it collapses. Modern supermarket bacon is often leaner and more heavily brined than its nineteenth-century counterpart; if the pan looks dry at ten minutes, a spoonful of stock keeps it going.
- White StockA mild veal or chicken stock, unbrowned, from earlier in the same book. Any low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid a dark brown beef stock, which overwhelms the cabbage.
- "One-fourth cup rice, boiled"Ambiguous in the original. Read as a quarter cup of raw rice that has already been boiled, which yields roughly three-quarters of a cup cooked. Either reading works in practice, but the larger amount gives the proportion the dish seems to want.
- YieldThe cabbage dish serves two as a side. The pilaf, from half a cup of raw rice, serves two to three.
- Turkish Pilaf: brown the rice properlyOne tablespoon butter for half a cup of rice is scant. Stir constantly over medium heat until the grains smell nutty and turn pale gold; this is what distinguishes a pilaf from boiled rice and it takes four or five minutes.
- "Hot stewed tomatoes"In this period the term generally meant tomatoes stewed down with butter and seasoning (some versions also added sugar or bread crumbs), rather than the canned product sold under that name now. A can of whole tomatoes, crushed and simmered ten minutes, is a reasonable substitute.
- Adding acid to riceThe tomatoes go in only after the first cup of water is absorbed, and that order matters. Acid slows the softening of rice, so tomatoes added at the start leave the grains chalky.
- SeasoningBoth dishes take their salt and pepper late rather than at the start. Bacon and stock both carry salt, so taste before adding any.
The name "Riston" does not correspond to any place or person that can be documented, and it appears in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book without explanation; nineteenth-century American cookbooks were fond of attaching vaguely continental tags to plain dishes, and this may simply be one of them. What the recipe really represents is a lesson in economy — a quarter cup of leftover boiled rice bulks out half a cabbage and two slices of bacon into a meal. The Turkish Pilaf that follows reflects the era's broad, undifferentiated use of "Turkish" for any rice cooked in fat before liquid, a technique that bore only a loose relation to actual Ottoman pilav.