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Risotto
Cut a small white onion into pieces and cook in butter until golden brown. Add two cups of cooked rice, one cup of chicken stock, soup or gravy, and cook until rice has taken up the liquid.
Sprinkle one or two full tablespoonfuls grated cheese into rice, add pepper, salt, piece of butter, and chopped giblets if they are at hand.
Rice Custard No. 1 (very simple) Cook one cup of cold boiled rice and one-half cup of milk in double boiler until rice is very soft. Beat one egg light with one tablespoonful sugar and a sprinkling of salt. Pour hot rice and milk gradually over egg mixture, stirring well. Transfer to dish in which custard is to be served. Grate nutmeg over top. Serve very cold. Rice Custard No. 2 Combine left-over soft custard with cooked rice, using at least twice as much custard as rice. If whites of eggs are at hand, beat up a meringue, using one tablespoonful powdered sugar to each stiffly beaten white. Add few drops vanilla. Pile on top of custard and garnish with bits of jelly.
Three separate uses for yesterday's rice, run together in one paragraph. The risotto and Rice Custard No. 2 are straightforward; Rice Custard No. 1 is not, and the reason is worth understanding before you start.
- The custard is never cookedRice Custard No. 1 has you beat one raw egg with sugar, pour hot rice and milk over it, and then move it straight to a serving dish to chill. Nothing returns to the heat. A cup of rice and half a cup of milk from a double boiler will not hold enough heat to bring a whole beaten egg to the 160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed, and the mixture then sits in the danger zone while it cools. Use a current stirred-custard recipe, which cooks the egg over heat to temperature.
- Custard No. 2 depends on what you already haveIt calls for left-over soft custard, which in a kitchen of this period meant a cooked stirred custard. If yours came from a properly cooked batch it is fine; the recipe adds no cooking of its own, so it inherits whatever safety the original had.
- This is not risotto in the Italian senseReal risotto is built from raw rice, toasted in fat and fed stock ladle by ladle so the grains release starch. This is a reheat of already-boiled rice. Expect a savoury rice pilaf, pleasant but without the creaminess; do not stir it aggressively hoping for one.
- Rice and liquidTwo cups of cooked rice to one cup of stock is about right for absorption; the recipe gives no time, only 'cook until rice has taken up the liquid', so watch the pan. If the rice was long-grain and cold from the refrigerator, break up the clumps with a fork first or the centres stay dry.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this period usually means a dry grating cheese, whether sold as Parmesan or a hard aged domestic cheese. Add it off the heat or at the very lowest setting; a hard cheese stirred into a boiling pan separates into strings and oil.
- GibletsThe chopped giblets are assumed to be left from a roast bird, meaning already cooked. Raw giblets need to be cooked through separately before they go in, not warmed in the rice.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. As a rough guide, two cups of cooked rice will serve two as a main course or four as a side, and each custard makes about two small servings.
Books of this kind belong to a distinct genre that flourished in America and Britain in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century: the left-over cookery manual, aimed at households that took thrift seriously. Boiled rice was a standing side dish and there was routinely some left. The name risotto is Italian, from riso, rice, and it entered English-language cookbooks in the late nineteenth century as a general label for savoury rice with cheese and stock, well before most Anglophone cooks had encountered the Milanese method of building the dish from raw grain. What appears here under that name is a reheating technique wearing a borrowed word, which was common at the time: French and Italian names lent respectability to thrift. The two rice custards show the same logic from the sweet side, with No. 2 building a second dessert out of the remains of a first.