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Casserole of Rice and Liver
After boiling a half pint of rice in a quart of water, mash the rice smooth with two tablespoons of butter and salt and pepper to taste. Line a well-greased casserole with the mixture, pressing the paste firmly against bottom and sides, and leaving a large hollow in the center. Set in a cold place until firm. Meanwhile boil a pound of lamb's liver, drain and chop fine. Heat in a saucepan two cups of soup stock, season with a teaspoon of caramel, thicken with browned flour and stir into this sauce the minced liver. Fill the hollow in the center of the rice with the liver mixture, sprinkle with crumbs and set in the oven to brown.
A rice-crust pie baked in a deep dish, from the era when "casserole" was starting to mean the vessel as often as the stew inside it. The hinge is the rice: it must be cooked soft, mashed to a genuine paste, and thoroughly chilled, or the wall slumps the moment the hot filling goes in.
- Half a pint of riceOne cup of raw long- or medium-grain rice to a quart (4 cups) of water — twice the usual liquid, deliberately, because the grains need to break down enough to mash. Cook it covered and low until the water is gone and the rice is soft to the point of stickiness.
- The casserole itselfThe casserole here is the earthenware or enameled baking dish, not the mixture. A 1½- to 2-quart round dish or deep pie plate suits the quantity; grease it well, as the rice paste sticks hard once browned.
- Chilling the shell"Set in a cold place until firm" means the refrigerator, at least an hour. Skipping this is the usual failure — warm rice paste will not hold a hollow under two cups of sauce.
- Lamb's liverSold as lamb liver at butchers, often by order; calf's liver is the closest substitute and beef liver is stronger and coarser. Boiling is the period method and gives a firm, easily minced texture, but modern cooks generally sear liver briefly instead, since prolonged boiling makes it dry and grainy. If you boil it, ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer is enough for a pound.
- A teaspoon of caramelNot caramel candy or sauce — this is burnt-sugar colouring, sugar cooked black and let down with water, kept in a bottle for darkening gravies. A few drops of gravy browning or a teaspoon of soy sauce does the same work for colour and a little depth.
- Browned flourBrowned flour is flour toasted dry in a skillet or a slow oven until nut-coloured. It thickens less strongly than raw flour, so you will need noticeably more than the usual two tablespoons per cup of stock, worked in with an equal weight of butter or slaked with cold stock first.
- Crumbs and ovenDry breadcrumbs, better if tossed with a little melted butter. The recipe gives no temperature — 'set in the oven to brown' implies a fairly hot oven, and fifteen to twenty minutes should do it, since everything is already cooked and you are only heating through and colouring the top.
- YieldFour servings as a main course with a green vegetable; six if it is one dish among several.
Liver was cheap, nutritious and, in a period cookbook, unremarkable — organ meats appear throughout early twentieth-century American household manuals as a matter of economy rather than novelty. What is period-specific here is the framing: the Butterick Cook Book was published by the pattern company for a readership of home dressmakers and housekeepers, and it appears at just the moment when the covered earthenware dish was being marketed to American kitchens as a labour-saving, fuel-saving, serve-at-table vessel. The rice lining is the giveaway of a formal ancestry: it stands in for the pastry of a raised pie or the piped duchesse potato border of a French bordure, letting a modest pound of liver be presented as a composed dish. Browned flour and bottled caramel colouring, both taken for granted here, belonged to a kitchen that judged a sauce first by its depth of colour and kept the means to fake it on the shelf.