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Jelly
Yolk of 1/4 egg 1 teaspoonful salt Crumbs and eggs for "breading" Grated nutmeg to taste Mix butter, sugar, salt, nutmeg, and beaten yolk of egg with the rice, form into croquettes and place a bit of jelly in the center of each, closing it well in with rice. Roll in fine sifted bread or cracker-crumbs, then in egg (one tablespoonful of water beaten with the egg), and in crumbs again.
Fry in deep fat. Serve with lemon sauce or powdered sugar and cream. Lemon Sauce No. 1 1/2 cup white sugar 1 egg Few grains salt cup boiling water Juice of lemon 1 tablespoonful flour, blended in 2 tablespoonfuls cold water Beat sugar and well-beaten egg together. Stir blended flour into boiling water, let boil up well, and pour it over the egg and sugar, beating with Dover egg-beater. Add the lemon.
A way of using up cold boiled rice: sweetened croquettes with a hidden core of jelly, fried and sauced. The text as printed has lost several of its fractions, so treat the quantities below as reconstruction rather than transcription.
- The missing amountsThe ingredient list has been garbled and the rice, butter and sugar quantities are gone entirely. A workable base is about 2 cups cold cooked rice, 1 tablespoon butter, 2 tablespoons sugar and the yolk; the salt at a full teaspoon is high for that volume and half is plenty. In the sauce, "cup white sugar" and "cup boiling water" have each probably lost a fraction -- perhaps a half or a third of a cup -- and "Juice of lemon" may have been half a lemon.
- The hinge: seal the jelly inThe jelly liquefies in the fryer and will blow out through any gap in the rice or any crack in the crumb coat. Press the rice firmly around a scant teaspoon of stiff jelly, patch the seam, and check the breaded croquette all over before it goes near the fat.
- Chill before fryingFormed croquettes should go into the refrigerator for at least half an hour after breading. Cold, firm croquettes hold their shape and keep the jelly from melting through before the crust sets.
- Deep fat temperature"Fry in deep fat" gives no temperature; around 365-375F is the usual modern working range. Two to three minutes gives a brown crust; hotter and the outside colours before the centre warms, cooler and the rice drinks oil. Fry three or four at a time so the fat does not drop.
- Rice for the purposeLeft-over rice from a plain boiling works only if it is soft and a little sticky. Short-grain or a risotto-style rice binds; long-grain parboiled rice is less likely to hold together and may need an extra yolk or a spoonful of thick white sauce.
- Dover egg-beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, standard equipment in American kitchens from the 1870s onward. A balloon whisk does the same job here.
- The lemon saucePouring the boiled flour-and-water over beaten egg and sugar tempers but does not reliably cook the egg. Return the finished sauce to low heat and stir until it reaches 160F, then add the lemon juice off the heat so it does not curdle or dull.
- YieldAbout eight to ten croquettes from 2 cups of rice, serving four as a sweet course. The sauce quantity, reconstructed, makes roughly a cup.
Croquettes of this kind belong to the great age of the chafing dish and the fry kettle, when a competent cook was expected to turn any cold remainder into something that could be sent to table looking deliberate. Sweet rice croquettes with a hidden centre of jelly appear across late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks, usually filed under puddings or under left-overs, and they are generally traced to the French croquette de riz, reaching household manuals of this generation by way of the cooking schools. The jelly core is the same trick as the jam in a doughnut: a small quantity of something bright and expensive placed where it will be found.