No. 2952

Rice Croquettes with Salpicon

Croquettes de Riz au Salpicon

Pick and wash half a pound of rice; blanch, drain and refresh; place it in a saucepan to moisten with broth (No. 194a) to three times its heights; add a quarter of a pound of butter and a seasoning of salt, pepper and nutmeg. When the rice is sufficiently cooked (in twenty or thirty minutes), mix into it a salpicon weighing a quarter of a pound, composed of tongue, truffles, chicken, game and mushrooms--all to be mixed evenly after cutting in three-sixteenths of an inch squares. Leave this stand till cold, then form into round, flat, oval or oblong croquettes; dip in beaten eggs, then in bread-crumbs, and fry to a fine color. Dress on a folded napkin with fried parsley on top.

← No. 2951 Soft Eggs with Puree of Sorrel Macaroni, Rice & Farinaceous No. 2953 Fedelini Vermicellini au Cardinal →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade with stockpots and trimmings on hand. Two things decide the outcome: rice cooked soft enough to bind itself, and a mixture chilled hard before shaping.

The hinge is the riceThe croquette holds together on starch alone, with no egg or panade in the body. A short- or medium-grain rice (arborio, carnaroli, Valencia) cooked until the grains break down into a stiff, sticky mass binds most reliably; long-grain rice gives a looser mixture that is harder to shape.
"Blanch, drain and refresh"Boil the washed rice a couple of minutes in plenty of salted water, drain, rinse under cold water. It rinses off loose surface starch and grit; the real cooking follows in broth.
"To three times its heights"Broth poured to three times the depth of the rice in the pan, roughly 3 parts liquid to 1 part rice by volume. Half a pound of rice is about 1 1/4 cups, so roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of broth. Expect to add a little more if the pan is wide.
No. 194 aA cross-reference to one of the book's own broths. Any unsalted or lightly salted stock works; note that the recipe seasons the rice as it cooks, and the broth reduces almost entirely into the rice.
SalpiconSimply a mixture of cooked ingredients diced small and bound or seasoned. Three-sixteenths of an inch is a scant 5 mm dice. Cooked tongue, chicken and mushrooms are easy; truffle can be a few grams shaved fine or omitted, and "game" can be any leftover roast duck, pheasant or rabbit. Everything must already be cooked.
The butterA quarter pound of butter to half a pound of rice is rich by modern habit but it is doing structural work, keeping the paste pliable and helping it set firm when cold. Cutting it much below 3 oz gives a drier, crumblier croquette.
Chilling"Leave this stand till cold" means spread on a tray and refrigerated until fully firm, at least two hours. Warm mixture will not shape and will burst in the fryer.
FryingDeep fat at 350-360F, three to four minutes, until deep gold. Hotter and the crumb colours before the centre warms through. Fry the parsley separately in dry sprigs for about fifteen seconds; wet parsley spits violently.
Yield12 to 16 croquettes, enough for six as a first course. The folded napkin on the platter was standard nineteenth-century service for fried dishes; a rack or paper does the same job.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe shows how that kitchen could turn its own trimmings into service. A salpicon was a convenient use for the ends of a braised tongue, the carcass meat of a roast chicken, the trimmings from a game bird and the peelings of truffles: diced fine, all of it reads as luxury again. Rice croquettes themselves are far older and more widely spread than Delmonico's -- the Sicilian arancino works on the same principle of starchy rice, a savoury centre and a fried crumb -- but Ranhofer's version disperses the filling through the body instead of hiding it in the middle. The fried parsley and the folded napkin are pure period service, the sort of finish that told a diner of the era that a plain grain dish had been treated as seriously as a roast.