Home › The World's Kitchen › Tomato-Rice Au Gratin
Tomato-Rice Au Gratin
Place six ounces rice in a saucepan with pint tomato sauce, half pint broth, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Mix well and boil thirty-five minutes, stirring once in a while. Add two ounces grated Parmesan cheese with half ounce butter, mix well, then drop the tomato-rice into a baking dish. Sprinkle a little bread crumbs over, arrange a few small bits butter on top, set in oven to bake twelve minutes. Remove and serve.
A straightforward tomato risotto finished under a crust of crumbs and cheese. The only figures that need adjusting are the cooking time and the pepper.
- Weights to volumeSix ounces of rice is about 170 g, close to a cup by volume. Two ounces of grated Parmesan is roughly half a cup loosely packed; half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Pints and the liquid ratioA pint of tomato sauce plus half a pint of broth gives three cups of liquid, roughly three parts liquid to one part rice by volume, which is why the rice is stirred rather than left alone. Expect a loose, risotto-like mass going into the dish.
- Thirty-five minutes is too longThirty-five minutes is long -- Modern long-grain or Arborio is done in 18-20 minutes; keep the lid off, stir often, and stop when the grains are tender and the sauce clings. Add liquid in stages rather than all at once if it threatens to dry out.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper for four servings. That is assertive by current taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern seasoning, and the Parmesan brings its own salt.
- The oven heat is unstatedTwelve minutes only makes sense in a hot oven — 425F will brown the crumbs without drying the rice beneath. A minute or two under the broiler does the same job if the mixture is still hot when it goes in the dish.
- Get the crumbs rightDry, coarse crumbs and the dots of butter are what make this a gratin rather than baked rice. Fine soft crumbs absorb the tomato and go pasty; toss them with a little of the grated cheese for a firmer crust.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, two or three as a supper on its own. It sets as it cools and reheats well, though the crust does not survive a second baking.
The International Cook Book belongs to a generation of American professional cookbooks — its authorship is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York — that catalogued the dishes of Europe for hotel and household kitchens alike. The dish itself is Italian in outline: rice cooked in tomato and broth until it takes up the liquid, enriched with Parmesan and butter, then browned. Calling it au gratin rather than anything Italian reflects the period's habit of filing all browned, crumbed, cheese-topped dishes under French terminology, whatever their origin; gratin is usually traced to the crust that is scraped from the dish, rather than to any particular cheese or sauce.</br>