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Carrole of Rice
It 612. Take some well-picked rice, wash it well, and boil it five minutes in water, strain it, and put it into a stewpan, with a bit of butter, a good slice of ham, and an onion. Stew it over a very gentle fire till tender, have ready a mould lined with very thin slices of bacon , mix the yolks of two or three eggs with the rice, and then line the bacon with it about half an inch thick. Put into it a ragout of chicken, rabbit, veal, or of any thing else. Fill up the mould, and cover it close with rice. Bake it in a quick oven an hour, turn it over, and send it to table in a good gravy or curry sauce. SALMAGUNDY. 613. This is a beautiful small dish, if in nice shape, and if the colours of the ingredients are varied. For this purpose chop separately the white parts of cold chicken or veal, yolks of eggs boiled hard, the whites of eggs, parsley, half a dozen anchovies, beet-root, red pickled cabbage, ham and grated tongues, or any thing well flavoured, and of a good colour. Some people like a small proportion of onion, but it may be better left out. A saucer, large teacup, or any other base, must be put into a small dish; then make rows round it wide at bottom, and growing smaller towards the top, choosing such of the ingredients for each row as will most vary the colours. At the top a little sprig of curled parsley may be stuck in. Or, without any thing on the dish, the salmagundy may be laid in rows, or put into
A moulded rice case baked around a ready-made stew — the Victorian ancestor of the timbale. The rice does the structural work, so treat it as pastry rather than as a side dish.
- The hinge: the filling must be cooked firstA ragout of chicken, rabbit or veal goes in already stewed and thick. The hour in the oven sets the rice shell and heats the centre through; it will not cook raw meat, and a thin, wet ragout will soften the walls and collapse the mould when turned out.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400–425F. At that heat the bacon lining renders and browns against the mould, which helps the whole thing release.
- Choose the right riceUse a short or medium grain that goes sticky — pudding rice, arborio, or a plain short-grain white. A long-grain or basmati will not bind, and the case will crumble on turning out. The five-minute parboil is only to soften the grain before it finishes in the stewpan.
- The stewpan stageButter, a slice of ham and a whole onion for flavour, over the lowest heat with a little liquid, until the grains are tender and tacky. Fish out the onion and the ham before you line the mould, or slice the ham finely and leave it in. Season now: the rice is bland once baked.
- Egg yolksTwo or three yolks stirred into the rice while it is warm but not scalding — hot enough to take, cool enough not to scramble. They are the binder that turns the rice into a shell.
- Lining the mouldA plain charlotte mould or a deep 1½–2 quart pudding basin. Butter it, line with the thinnest bacon or pancetta you can buy, overlapping the strips and letting the ends hang over the rim, then press the rice up the sides half an inch thick. Fold the bacon ends over the rice lid before baking.
- Turning outLet it stand ten minutes out of the oven before inverting, so the egg-set rice firms. Run a knife round the edge and turn onto a warm dish with a lip, since the gravy or curry sauce is poured round rather than over.
- YieldA two-quart mould serves six to eight as a main course.
The name is a variant spelling of casserole — which in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery could mean not a baking dish but a moulded case of rice or pastry built to hold a ragout, what later cooks called a timbale or a bordure de riz. Recipes of this shape appear in a number of English cookery books, and the wording here is close to that of Maria Rundell, whose A New System of Domestic Cookery was plundered by compilers for decades. The dish belongs to a kitchen where yesterday's stewed rabbit or the remains of a fowl were expected to reappear at table looking deliberate, and where a copper mould was ordinary equipment rather than a curiosity. Curry powder was available as a shop-bought British store-cupboard item from the late eighteenth century onward, and rice and curry were already associated on English tables.