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Rice Pancake
(Frittelle di riso) Cook thoroughly 1/4 lb. of rice in about a pint of water giving it taste with a little piece of sugar and a taste of lemon peel. Leave it cool and then add three yolks of eggs and a little flour. Mix well and let the whole rest for several hours.
When you are going to fry beat the white of an egg to a froth, add it to the rice and throw into the frying pan one tablespoonful at a time.
Serve hot sprinkled with confectionery sugar. 71
A plain Italian rice fritter, the kind fried by the spoonful rather than shaped. The batter is made a day ahead in all but name, and that resting time is what makes it hold together.
- Quantities1/4 lb of rice is about 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon (roughly 115 g) of raw short-grain rice; a pint of water is 2 cups. Cooked "thoroughly" here means soft and sticky, well past al dente; a pint is more water than this much rice will take up, so any left standing needs cooking or draining off before the mixture cools.
- The rice to useA short-grain Italian rice such as arborio or vialone nano suits this best. Any short- or medium-grain rice works; long-grain releases less starch and binds the batter less well.
- "A little piece of sugar"Genuinely vague. A teaspoon or two sweetens the rice without making it a dessert batter, and the real sweetness comes from the sugar dusted on at the end. The lemon peel should be a wide strip of zest with no white pith, fished out before the eggs go in.
- Do not skip the restThe several hours of standing lets the starch set and the flour hydrate, so the spoonfuls keep their shape in the fat. Batter fried straight away tends to spread and break up. Refrigerate it if the wait runs long.
- Flour"A little flour" is about 2 to 3 tablespoons. Add it a spoonful at a time until the mixture holds on the spoon; too much and the fritters turn bready.
- Egg white lastBeat and fold in the white immediately before frying, not earlier. It is the only lift these have, and it collapses if it sits in the rice.
- FryingShallow-fry in about an inch of neutral oil or lard at 350-360F, a tablespoon at a time as directed, turning once. Roughly two to three minutes a side, until deep gold. Crowding the pan drops the temperature and makes them greasy.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; at a tablespoon at a time this quantity of rice makes a good many small fritters. "Confectionery sugar" is powdered or icing sugar; dust it on while the fritters are still hot and eat them at once, as they soften quickly.
Frittelle di riso belong to the Tuscan and Emilian repertoire of fried sweets, and are most often associated with St. Joseph's Day, March 19, when frying pans came out across central Italy for fritters of rice, flour or cream; the connection is traditional rather than documented in any single source. Pellegrino Artusi set down a version of frittelle di riso in his La scienza in cucina (1891), though he cooks the rice in milk rather than, as here, in sweetened water scented with lemon peel before binding it with egg. Its appearance in an English-language collection like this one reflects an appetite for Italian home cooking translated into plain instructions, with the original's habit of measuring by taste and feel left largely intact.