Rice Fan-Tan
Cook a half-cup of well-washed rice in a pint of milk until very soft. Stir in a heaping tablespoon of sugar and one well-beaten egg and remove at once from the fire. Mix in a halfcup of assorted candied fruits-cherries, apricots, and pineappleand turn into a shallow, well-buttered pan to cool. When firm cut into strips about an inch and a half wide and three inches long; dip in egg and bread crumbs and brown delicately on both sides in butter. Drain, dust with powdered sugar, and serve hot.
DEVILLED BONES, No. I-Score deep, with a knife, the legs, back or wings of a turkey or other fowl, rub over with melted butter, cover them thickly with a paste made of two tablespoons of salad oil, a little cayenne, salt, one heaping tablespoon of mustard and onehalf teaspoon of white pepper; dredge with flour, broil and serve hot.
DEVILLED BONES, No. 2-Take the legs or any other bones of cold turkey, chicken, geese, etc., and butter them; mix together one dessertspoon of made mustard, chutney and curry powder and cover the bones thickly with the mixture; then broil them lightly. Now make a sauce of one teacup of gravy, one teaspoon of pulverized or sifted loaf sugar, one-fourth teaspoon of cayenne, the juice of one lemon, one-half glass of sherry and two or three teaspoons of catsup; mix all together over the fire, put the bones in the sauce for five minutes and serve very hot, PATÉ DE FOIE GRAS (Imitation) - An excellent imitation of pâté de foie gras may be made as follows: Carefully clean, cook and finely chop a number of chicken livers, and mash them to a paste with a wooden spoon. Try out whatever fat is left from the chicken, and in it fry one-fourth of an onion finely chopped. Place the livers and the fat (with the onion) in a cup, and season with pepper and salt, and either mustard or celery salt according to taste. Place at once on ice. This makes excellent sandwiches, and may also be attractively served on toast.
A sweet rice pudding set firm, cut into fingers, breaded and fried — essentially a dessert croquette. The whole dish depends on getting the rice cooked soft enough to bind and then chilling it properly.
- The hinge: chill it hard"When firm" means thoroughly cold, not merely cooled — at least three hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better. Warm rice paste will slump off the crumb coating and break apart in the fat.
- Rice choiceUse a short or medium grain rice (arborio, pudding rice, calrose). The starch is what holds the strips together; long grain or converted rice releases less of it and sets far less reliably.
- Proportions and panA half cup of rice to a pint of milk (2 cups) is correct for a very soft porridge. Turn it into a pan that gives a layer about three-quarters of an inch deep — an 8-inch square pan suits this quantity.
- The eggBeat the egg with a spoonful of the hot rice before stirring it in, then take the pan off the heat immediately as directed. Left over the flame the egg curdles and the mixture turns grainy.
- Candied fruitHalf a cup of chopped mixed candied cherries, apricot and pineapple. Modern glacé fruit is often sold in very hard pieces; chop small and, if stiff, soak briefly in warm water and drain well so no extra moisture goes into the rice.
- FryingShallow-fry in clarified butter or a butter-and-oil mix over medium heat. Whole butter alone browns and burns before the coating sets; "delicately" here means golden, roughly two to three minutes a side.
- YieldThis quantity gives about eight to ten fingers, enough for four servings. Fry and dust with powdered sugar at the last moment, as the coating softens quickly.
"Fan-tan" was a Chinese gambling game widely known in American cities by the late nineteenth century, and its name was attached to novelty items such as fan-tan rolls, often said to be so called because they were made of separate strips or divisions. Something like that may be the sense here: a rice pudding cut into uniform fingers. The dish itself belongs to a large family of fried sweet croquettes that filled American cookbooks around 1900, when leftover rice or semolina pudding was routinely set, cut, crumbed and browned to be served as a hot pudding. The cook book aimed itself at households running on economy, and a dessert built from rice, milk and one egg fits that brief exactly.