Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Italian Rice Balls
Italian Rice Balls
Take some cooked rice, not too moist, and nicely flavored and sweetened, roll it flat, cut it into pieces of convenient shape, and roll them up like a sausage putting a little preserve in the center of each. Brush them over with egg, cover them with sifted breadcrumbs, and fry them.
A sweet cousin of Sicilian arancini, written in the telegraphic style Oscar used for staff who already knew the drill. The recipe assumes you have leftover sweetened rice pudding on hand; almost everything that can go wrong here is a moisture problem.
- "Not too moist" is the whole recipeThe rice must be stiff enough to hold a shape cold — thick enough that a spoon stands up in it. Rice cooked in milk with sugar until the liquid is fully absorbed, then chilled several hours, will roll; anything looser will burst its coating in the fat.
- What rice to useA short or medium grain (arborio, carnaroli, or plain pudding rice) gives the starch that binds. Long-grain and parboiled rice bind less readily and are likelier to crumble when breaded.
- "Nicely flavored and sweetened"For about 1 cup dry rice cooked in 3 cups milk, figure 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar, a pinch of salt, and lemon zest, vanilla or a scrape of cinnamon. An egg yolk stirred into the hot rice, off the heat, tightens it further.
- Rolling it flatSpread the cold rice about 1/2 inch thick on a lightly oiled or parchment-lined tray, chill again, then cut into rectangles roughly 3 by 4 inches. Damp hands, not floured, keep it from sticking as you roll each around a teaspoon of jam.
- Seal before you breadPreserve leaking into hot fat spatters and burns. Pinch the seam and both ends closed, chill the shaped rolls 30 minutes, then egg and crumb them; a second pass through egg and crumbs is cheap insurance.
- FryingDeep fat at 350–360F, three or four minutes, turning once — long enough to color the crust and warm the center, no longer. Hotter fat browns the crumbs before the jam softens; cooler fat soaks them.
- Yield and servingThat quantity of rice makes roughly eight to a dozen rolls, serving four to six. Drain on a rack, dust with powdered sugar or cinnamon sugar, and serve warm, ideally with a fruit sauce.
Fried sweetened rice, egged, crumbed and stuffed with jam, belongs to a family of dishes that ran through nineteenth-century European cookery under names like croquettes de riz — the same technique as the savory rice ball, turned to dessert. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 onward, was not a trained cook, and his 1896 Cook Book works as a vast compilation of the hotel kitchen's repertoire rather than a book of tested formulas; entries this brief are notes for professionals, with the proportions left to the man at the range. The dish may also reflect a plainer kitchen economy: sweet rice puddings were made in quantity, and yesterday's cold pudding, cut and fried, could reappear as a new course.