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C.t.c
Boil one cup of rice in one quart of milk or water, till tender; while warm add a piece of butter the size of an egg, two eggs; make into rolls, dip them in crumbs and fry them in lard or butter.
A plain rice croquette, unsweetened and unseasoned as written. The measurements are workable; the omissions are what need filling in.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books measured butter by comparison because it came in irregular lumps rather than stamped sticks.
- Rice and liquidOne cup of rice to a quart of liquid is a lot; the point is a soft, sticky, almost pudding-like mass that will hold a shape. Use a long-grain or medium-grain white rice and let it cook down until the grains break, roughly 25-35 minutes, stirring so the milk does not scorch on the bottom.
- Cool before shapingThe butter and eggs go in while the rice is warm; the recipe does not say when to shape, but a cooled mixture is far easier to handle. Spread it on a plate and chill it thoroughly, ideally an hour or more, or the rolls may slump and burst in the fat.
- Eggs do double dutyThe two eggs are stirred into the rice as a binder. The recipe gives no egg wash, so the crumbs will only cling to a cold, tacky surface; if yours is dry, a beaten egg between rice and crumbs makes the coating hold.
- CrumbsThe recipe says only "crumbs"; fine dry breadcrumbs, rather than the coarse modern panko sort, suit the dish best and brown evenly at frying temperature.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of fat at 350-360F, turning once, until deep gold on all sides. Lard was the default and still gives the cleanest result; butter alone will brown too fast unless clarified.
- Seasoning and yieldThe original names neither salt nor sugar. Salt the cooking liquid, and add sugar, cinnamon or lemon zest if you want the dessert version. Expect about a dozen rolls, enough for four to six.
Rice croquettes of this kind sat in the awkward middle ground of Victorian cookery: sweetened and dusted with sugar they were a dessert, salted and served under gravy they were a supper dish or a vegetable side, and community cookbooks often printed them without saying which. The dish belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century "made-over" recipes built to use up cooked rice or a leftover rice pudding, an economy that mattered when milk kept poorly and little edible was thrown out. The croquette form itself is generally traced to French practice, and the technique -- bind a soft mixture with egg, chill it, crumb it, fry it -- arrived in English and American kitchens as a way of turning remnants into something that could be sent to table looking deliberate. Lard rather than oil is the tell of the period: it was cheap, often rendered at home, and a standard frying fat in North American households well into the twentieth century.