Home › Entrées and Made-Over Dishes › Rice Fan-Tan
Rice Fan-Tan
½ cup rice
1 egg
2 cups milk
½ cup candied fruits
½ teaspoon salt
Egg and crums
2 tablespoons sugar
Powdered sugar
Cook rice in milk until very soft. Stir in salt, sugar and wellbeaten egg, and remove at once from the fire. Mix in assorted candied fruits-cherries, apricots and pineapple-and turn into a shallow, well-oiled pan to cool. When firm, cut into strips about one and one-half inches wide and three inches long, dip in egg and bread-crums and brown delicately on both sides in butter or butter substitute. Drain, dust with powdered sugar and serve hot.
A sweet fried rice cake in the croquette family, and the whole dish depends on the rice setting firm enough to slice. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: cook it dry, then chill it hardThe hinge: cook it thick, then let it set firm -- The rice needs to absorb most of the milk and thicken to a paste that will hold its shape. The recipe asks only for a shallow oiled pan and cooling until firm; spread it shallow (roughly half to three-quarters of an inch) and chill it thoroughly, as a warm or soupy pudding will collapse in the pan.
- Rice to useShort or medium grain — arborio, Calrose, pudding rice. Parboiled or converted rice will not release enough starch to bind, and long grain basmati is wrong here in both texture and aroma.
- "Egg and crums"A standard breading station of the period: one beaten egg, loosened with a spoonful of milk, and fine dry breadcrumbs. Panko works but reads coarse against the soft interior; fine dry crumbs give the delicate browning the recipe asks for.
- "Butter substitute"Phrasing common in American cookbooks of the WWI and interwar years, when butter was expensive; oleomargarine and vegetable shortenings were among the substitutes on offer. Butter alone can brown too fast at frying heat — clarified butter, or butter cut half and half with a neutral oil, keeps the crumbs from scorching.
- Candied fruitsGlacé cherries, apricots and pineapple are still sold at holiday time. Chop them small and pat them dry, or the wet syrup will streak the set rice; if they have gone hard, a brief soak in warm water and a thorough drying will soften them.
- Sugar levelTwo tablespoons for half a cup of rice is a modestly sweet pudding, the candied fruit and the powdered sugar dusting doing most of the work. Taste before chilling if you want it sweeter — you cannot adjust it later.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no pan size or yield; half a cup of raw rice cooked in two cups of milk makes a small quantity, enough for a dessert for two to four once cut into the 1½ x 3 inch strips specified. Serve at once, since the strips soften as they sit.
The Butterick pattern company published household and cookery books alongside its dress patterns. Sliced, breaded and fried rice pudding belongs to the same family as the rice croquette and the Italian frittelle di riso, all of them ways to make a stiff cooked grain go a second round with a crisp surface. The name looks decorative rather than descriptive: fan-tan is a Chinese gambling game, and the name is often said to have been borrowed in American kitchens of the period for things cut into neat, repeating pieces — the fan-tan dinner roll being the best-known survivor — though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. Nothing in the ingredients points to Chinese cooking.