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Sweet Rice Croquettes
1 cup rice, cooked very soft 2 teaspoonfuls melted butter 1 teaspoonful sugar
The entry as printed is only the ingredient list; the method has been lost in the setting of the page, and the proportions themselves are terse enough to need reading twice. What follows fills in what a cook of the period would have assumed.
- The quantities as printedThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 1 cup of rice cooked very soft, 2 teaspoonfuls of melted butter, and 1 teaspoonful of sugar, which is what our text now gives.
- The missing methodCroquettes of this type are made by binding the cold cereal, shaping it, egg-and-crumbing it and frying it. Here that would mean mixing the butter and sugar through the rice, chilling it firm, forming small cylinders or cones, rolling them in beaten egg and then fine dry crumbs, and frying in deep fat until golden. No temperature or time is given in the original.
- The rice must be overcooked"Cooked very soft" is the hinge. Separate, al dente grains will not hold together and the croquettes fall apart in the fat. Leftover rice pudding base or rice boiled in milk until it breaks down is what is wanted.
- There is no binder listedOne cup of soft rice with only butter and sugar is a fragile mixture. Other published versions of rice croquettes often add an egg yolk, or a spoonful of thick white sauce, to the body of the croquette as well as to the coating.
- Sugar is a seasoning here, not a sweetenerSugar is barely a sweetener here -- A single teaspoon in a cup of rice is only faintly sweet by modern standards. Sweet croquettes of this kind were commonly sent to table with jam, a fruit sauce, or a dusting of powdered sugar, though the recipe as printed specifies nothing.
- Deep fat without a thermometerPeriod manuals gauged frying fat by a cube of bread browning in about forty seconds. That corresponds roughly to the temperatures modern recipes give for deep frying; a thermometer is more reliable. Too cool and the coating soaks fat, too hot and the crumbs darken before the inside heats. The recipe itself gives no test.
- YieldOne cup of rice makes roughly six small croquettes, enough for two people as a sweet course.
Rice croquettes belong to the long campaign against household waste. Croquettes were a common fate of cooked starch or minced meat, because egg-and-crumb coating and deep fat turn a cold, unappealing remainder into something that reads as a made dish. The technique is French in origin, and the word comes from croquer, to crunch, but it was thoroughly absorbed into American domestic-science cookery, where it appears in the manuals of the Boston Cooking School and its many imitators. A sweet version, served with fruit sauce as a dessert, was the obvious use for the remains of a rice pudding or a pot of milk-boiled rice.