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Rice with Cheese
Steam one cup rice, allowing one tablespoon salt; cover bottom of buttered pudding-dish with rice, dot over with three-fourths tablespoon butter, sprinkle with thin shavings mild cheese and a few grains cayenne; repeat until rice and one-fourth pound cheese are used. Add milk to half the depth of contents of dish, cover with buttered cracker crumbs, and bake until cheese melts.
A plain layered rice-and-cheese gratin from the cereals chapter, written for cooks who already knew how to steam rice and judge an oven by hand. Two details need translating: the salt and the missing temperature.
- The tablespoon of saltThat salt seasons the water or steaming liquid for a full cup of rice, not the finished dish. Taken literally into three cups of cooked rice it would be inedible; a teaspoon or slightly more is closer to modern palates, especially since the cheese and cracker crumbs add their own.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, as was standard when ranges had no thermometer. The instruction is simply to bake until the cheese melts; everything in the dish is already cooked. A moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F, will do the job in something like 20 to 25 minutes, though the recipe asks only for melted cheese and says nothing about colouring the crumbs.
- "Mild cheese"Most likely a young, unaged factory cheddar, sliced in thin shavings rather than grated, as the recipe specifies. A mild cheddar is the closest modern match; a sharp aged cheddar is more prone to separating into oil and curd if it is held in the oven.
- A quarter poundFour ounces of cheese to a cup of raw rice, which swells to about three cups cooked. That is a modest ratio by current standards, and the dish is meant to taste of rice with cheese through it rather than of cheese thickened with rice.
- Milk to half the depthJudge by the dish, not by a measure. Pour milk down the side until it reaches halfway up the layered rice; in a quart dish that will be something under a cup. Too much will leave a soupy bottom layer.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCrushed soda or common crackers tossed with melted butter, not the sweetened crumbs of a pie crust. Panko or dry white breadcrumbs with butter give the same effect.
- Steaming the riceSteamed rice keeps its grains separate, which is the point of the layering. Rice boiled soft will collapse into a single mass and the butter and cheese will not distribute.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; a cup of raw rice with four ounces of cheese would stretch to about four as a supper dish or six as a side. Best baked close to serving, since the crumb topping softens.
This is the kind of entry that shows what the Boston Cooking School was actually for. Fannie Farmer's 1896 book put rice among the cereals, alongside oatmeal and hominy, treating it as a starch to be cooked plainly and then dressed up rather than as the foundation of a cuisine. Cheese in the American household kitchen of the period was mostly factory cheddar, sold by the pound off a wheel, which is why the recipe asks for "mild cheese" and expects the reader to know what that meant at the grocer's. The dish belongs to a whole family of late-nineteenth-century economical bakes built from a cooked starch, a little butter, a little cheese and a crumb topping, designed to stretch protein. The few grains of cayenne are a formula that recurs often enough in the book to read as characteristic; it works as a seasoning rather than a heat source, in quantities small enough to sharpen dairy without registering as spice.