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Sausage-and-Rice Cakes
To one cup of cooked rice-warm or cold-add one egg unbeaten and two tablespoonfuls of cold fried sausage. Mix well together and form into flat cakes. If the mixture is very soft, add a little more rice. Brown lightly in butter or drippings, being careful to have the fat well heated before adding the cakes. This amount will make six medium-sized ones.
A plain binder-and-scraps cake that depends almost entirely on the pan being hot enough before the cakes go in. Everything else is adjustable.
- Get the fat hot firstThis is the hinge. Cakes held together by one raw egg will slump and stick if they meet lukewarm fat. Heat butter or drippings until it shimmers and a crumb of rice sizzles on contact, then leave the cakes undisturbed for three or four minutes before turning.
- "Two tablespoonfuls of cold fried sausage"Cooked bulk sausagemeat or sliced links, already browned and chilled, chopped small. Two tablespoons is a modest amount for a cup of rice; up to a quarter cup gives a cake that tastes of sausage rather than of rice.
- The egg goes in unbeatenStirring the whole egg through the grains coats them without whipping in air, which tends to give a denser cake than a beaten egg would.
- Rice choice mattersSticky short- or medium-grain leftovers bind on their own. Long-grain or converted rice is drier and looser, so expect to need the extra rice the recipe mentions only if you used something starchy and wet.
- Fixing a soft mixtureAdding more rice works; chilling the shaped cakes for 20 minutes will also firm them, and a tablespoon of flour or fine dry crumbs is a common modern addition.
- DrippingsThe saved fat from bacon or a roast. Bacon fat is the closest match and the most flattering here; butter alone browns fast, so a mix of the two is easier to control.
- Yield and servingSix cakes, so two or three people as a breakfast or supper dish. They want something sharp or moist alongside — stewed tomatoes, apple sauce, or a fried egg.
The formula -- starch, one egg, a little chopped meat, shaped and fried in saved fat -- recurs widely in leftover cookery under many names, from rice croquettes to hash cakes to the potato cake. Pork fat and pork scraps were a common seasoning in the American kitchen before vegetable shortening and refrigeration changed what a household kept on hand.