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Rice Jelly Cakes
Prepare the cakes and as soon as the cakes are made spread a teaspoon currant jelly over each cake and serve.
This entry is a finishing note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes the rice cakes described immediately before it in the book and tells you only what to do the moment they leave the pan. Everything below is about supplying what the fragment leaves out.
- The missing base"The cakes" are presumably the rice cakes of an adjacent entry in the original book; the fragment itself says nothing about how they are made. Any rice-cake or rice-croquette recipe of similar size will take the jelly.
- Spread while hotThe single instruction that matters is as soon as the cakes are made. Residual heat will slacken the jelly so that it spreads thinly rather than sitting in a lump; on a cold cake it is harder to spread without dragging the surface.
- Currant jellyPeriod recipes calling for currant jelly usually mean red currant; it was a common household preserve and is now a specialty item in many supermarkets. It is tart and sets firm; quince or crab apple jelly behave similarly, while a soft modern jam will slide off.
- A teaspoon is the whole quantityRead this as roughly a modern teaspoon (about 5 ml), though domestic spoon sizes of the period were not standardised and the recipe does not specify level or heaped. It is a glaze, not a filling.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity or yield. Currant jelly itself was commonly served as a sweet-tart accompaniment to roast meat and game in this period.
- Do not hold themFried rice cakes are best eaten straight away, and jelly left standing on them will weep. Cook, dress and carry them to the table in one movement.
Currant jelly was the default sweet-tart condiment of the nineteenth-century English and American kitchen — cheap to make from a garden bush, reliably setting without added pectin, and used on everything from mutton to muffins. Its appearance here, on a fried rice cake, reflects the period habit of turning yesterday's boiled rice into something presentable rather than throwing it out; rice croquettes and rice cakes appear in many general cookbooks of the era for exactly that reason. That The International Cook Book treats the variation as a separate entry at all is characteristic of the compendia of the 1900s and 1910s.