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Side Dish
R. A. Sibley.
Chopped cold meat well seasoned; wet with gravy, if convenient, put it on a platter; then take cold rice made moist with milk and one egg, season with pepper and salt; if not sufficient rice, add powdered bread crumbs; place this around the platter quite thick; set in oven to heat and brown.
A leftovers dish of the sort Victorian cooks made constantly: yesterday's roast chopped, moistened, and ringed with a rice border to bake. The original assumes you already have cold meat, cold rice and gravy in the larder.
- The hinge: moistureCold chopped meat dries out badly in the oven, so the gravy is not optional in practice. Allow roughly 1/2 cup of gravy or stock per pound of meat so the mixture is loose but not soupy; without it the finished dish is sawdust under a crust.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given; domestic ranges of the period rarely carried a usable oven thermometer, and the cook judged by hand and eye. Bake at 375F until the rice border is set and speckled brown, about 25-30 minutes, then a few minutes under the broiler if you want more colour.
- Everything starts cookedThis is a reheating recipe, not a cooking one. Both meat and rice must already be fully cooked; the oven only heats through and browns, so bring the dish to 165F at the centre.
- Quantities to work fromThe recipe gives none. For a platter serving four, use about 1 lb chopped cooked meat, 2 cups cooked rice, 1/4 cup milk and one egg, with 2-3 tablespoons dry breadcrumbs if the rice is slack.
- "Powdered bread crumbs"Dried crumbs pounded fine, closer to modern plain dry breadcrumbs than to panko. They are there to stiffen the rice paste, so use fine dry crumbs, not fresh.
- Building the border"Quite thick" suggests a substantial wall, perhaps an inch or so, banked up around the meat rather than mixed into it. A spoon or a piping bag with a wide plain tip both work; smooth the top so it browns evenly.
- SeasoningCold meat tastes flatter than hot, and cold rice tastes of almost nothing. Season both components more assertively than you would season a hot dish, and taste before assembling.
- VesselThe "platter" would have been an ovenproof earthenware or metal serving dish that could go from oven to table. Use a shallow gratin dish; a modern china platter may not take direct oven heat.
Dishes like this one belong to the great Victorian category of the "rehash" or "made dish" -- ways of dressing up the remains of a Sunday roast so they arrived at the table looking deliberate. The rice wall resembles the French bordure de riz, in which a moulded ring of rice encircles a savoury filling, here reduced to something a cook could bank up around a platter with a spoon. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local women and sold for charitable purposes, is full of such contributions signed with a name and nothing more, and the instructions assume a great deal: the reader was presumed to know what cold meat, cold rice and yesterday's gravy looked like, and needed only the idea.