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Rice Pudding with Giblets
(Sfornato di riso con rigoglie) Make a good brown stock (see No. 13) and use the same for the rice as well as for the giblets. To these add some thin slices of ham and brown them first in butter, seasoned moderately with salt and pepper, completing the cooking with brown stock. A taste of mushrooms will be found useful.
Brown the rice equally in butter, then complete the cooking with hot water. Drain and put the brown stock, adding grated cheese and two beaten eggs, when the rice has cooled a little. Take a smooth mold, round or oval, grease it evenly with butter, cover the bottom with buttered paper and place in it the rice to harden it in the oven. When taken from the mold pour over the gravy from the giblets, slighthly thickened with a pinch of flour and serve with the giblets around, seeing that there is plenty of gravy for them. 88
A savory molded rice, not a dessert: sfornato means "unmolded," and rigaglie are poultry giblets. The recipe assumes you already have the brown stock from elsewhere in the book and gives almost no quantities, so treat it as a method.
- The hinge: cool the rice before the eggsTwo beaten eggs are what binds the mold, and they will curdle into threads if stirred into rice that is still steaming. Let it drop to warm — comfortable to touch — then beat them in fast along with the cheese.
- Giblets cook at different ratesGizzards and hearts need 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering in the stock to become tender; livers need two or three minutes and turn granular and bitter if held longer. Brown the livers separately near the end and return them to the pan only to warm through.
- Working quantitiesFor a 1.5-quart mold: about 1½ cups rice, 3 cups brown stock plus water, 1 lb mixed giblets, 3 oz ham cut in thin strips, a handful of sliced mushrooms, ¾ cup grated Parmigiano, 2 eggs. Serves four to six as a first course or light main.
- Rice to useA short or medium-grain Italian rice — Arborio, Vialone Nano, Carnaroli — gives the starch that holds the mold together. Long-grain will taste fine and fall apart on the plate. Do not rinse it; the surface starch is the glue.
- Oven and moldThe book says only "harden it in the oven" and gives no heat or time; a moderate oven, around 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the center is set and the edges have pulled slightly from the sides, is a workable modern reading. A water bath is not called for but makes the set gentler and less likely to weep.
- Buttered paperParchment cut to fit the bottom of the mold, buttered on both sides. It is there so the disc releases cleanly; a nonstick pan liberally buttered and dusted with fine breadcrumbs works as well.
- Resting before unmoldingGive it ten minutes out of the oven before inverting. Straight from the heat the egg custard is still slack and the shape slumps.
- The sauce"Slightly thickened with a pinch of flour" is exactly that — the giblet pan juices loosened with stock and tightened just enough to coat, not a gravy. The instruction to see there is plenty of it is the important part: the rice is dry on its own.
- HamThe recipe says only "thin slices of ham"; in an Italian context this most likely indicates an unsmoked cooked ham or prosciutto trimmings. Heavily smoked American ham will dominate the giblets and the stock.
The recipe comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), one of a number of English-language Italian cookbooks published for American readers in this period; the cross-reference to "No. 13" for brown stock, and the sequence of numbered recipes, follow the pattern of the Italian domestic manuals of the period, above all Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina, from which much of this book's material is generally traced. Rigaglie — the hearts, gizzards, livers, and in older Italian practice the unlaid eggs and cockscombs of a hen — were a by-product of buying a whole bird, and a sfornato was one way of turning a small quantity of something rich into a dish that could be brought to the table whole. The word is still used in Italian kitchens for a baked, unmolded mixture, sweet or savory, and the English title "pudding" reflects an older, broader sense of the word that had not yet narrowed to dessert.