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Rice in Cheese Shells
See Creamed Cabbage in Cheese Shells, page 169.
Rice with Tomatoes No. 1 Add one tablespoonful of bacon fat to each cup of cold cooked rice used, and put a layer of it in the bottom of a baking-dish. Cover with slices of raw, peeled tomatoes, and season with salt, pepper, a few bits of crushed bacon, and a tablespoonful of shredded green sweet pepper. Repeat until the dish is filled, reserving a little rice to cover the top. Bake in hot oven until the tomatoes are tender, covering the dish for the first ten minutes.
Rice with Tomatoes No. 2 Season about a cup and a half of stewed tomatoes extra well, adding a little onion-juice if liked. They should be stewed down thick, and not watery.
Use an equal amount of tomatoes and cold rice.
Arrange in layers in a baking-dish and sprinkle each layer of rice with grated cheese before adding the tomatoes. Finish with rice and cheese on top.
Heat in oven just long enough for the cheese to melt.
Two straightforward casseroles for yesterday's rice, given in the compressed style of a book that assumes you already know your way around a baking-dish. The opening line is a cross-reference: the cheese shells themselves are made elsewhere in the book, and only the tomato variants are spelled out here.
- Hot oven"hot oven" in books of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. The recipe gives no time, only "until the tomatoes are tender"; expect roughly half an hour or more for No. 1, since the tomato slices go in raw. No. 2 specifies no oven heat and needs only long enough for the cheese to melt, everything in it being already cooked.
- Cover for the first ten minutesThis is the hinge of No. 1. The lid traps steam from the raw tomatoes so the rice rehydrates rather than drying into pellets; uncovering afterward lets the top layer crisp. Foil works if your dish has no cover.
- Bacon fatOne tablespoon per cup of rice is what carries the whole dish. Substituting butter or oil works mechanically but loses the smoke; if you use oil, add a little more crushed bacon to compensate.
- Green sweet pepperA green bell pepper. "Shredded" here means finely slivered rather than grated. A tablespoon per layer is a seasoning quantity, not a vegetable component.
- Stewed tomatoes, thickIn No. 2 the instruction to stew them down and not leave them watery is doing real work. Canned diced tomatoes drained and reduced in a pan for ten minutes give roughly the right consistency; straight from the can they will flood the rice.
- Onion-juiceA period ingredient: onion grated and the liquid pressed out, used where visible onion was unwanted. Half a small grated onion, juice and pulp together, is close enough.
- CheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese." In American books of this period that most often meant a firm yellow store cheese, for which a medium or sharp cheddar is the nearest thing today.
- YieldNeither version is portioned. No. 2 as written (a cup and a half of tomatoes with an equal amount of rice) makes about three cups in all, enough for a small dish and two or three servings; No. 1 is scaled by the tablespoon of bacon fat per cup of rice and can be made up to whatever size dish you are filling.
Left-over cookery was its own genre in the early twentieth century, and thrift was pressed as a mark of good housekeeping as much as a response to want. Rice was a natural subject: it was cheap, it kept, and cold cooked rice takes on whatever fat and seasoning it is layered with. Both of these recipes belong to the large family of American scalloped dishes, in which what is at hand is arranged in alternating strata in a baking-dish and heated until it coheres. The bacon fat in No. 1 is used freely as the main flavoring of an otherwise plain dish rather than as a byproduct to be got rid of.