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Casserole of Rice and Meat
2 cups chopped, cooked meat 1 teaspoon salt teaspoon pepper teaspoon onion juice 1 tablespoon chopped cup fine bread crumbs parsley 4 cups cooked rice 1 egg Season the meat, mix with crumbs and beaten egg, and add meat stock to make mixture pack easily. Line a greased mold, or baking pan, with 2 or 3 cups rice. Pack rice well and fill with meat, cover with the remainder of the rice, cover tightly and steam or bake about 45 minutes. Remove from mold. Serve with tomato sauce.
A tidy way to stretch Sunday's roast: a lined mold of cooked rice filled with seasoned minced meat, steamed or baked and turned out whole. It stands or falls on how firmly the rice is packed.
- Pack the rice hardThe rice wall is the structure of the dish; press it firmly against the greased mold with the back of a wet spoon, about half an inch thick, with no gaps at the seam where the lid of rice meets the sides. Loosely packed rice collapses the moment you invert it. Short or medium grain rice, cooked slightly soft, holds together far better than long grain.
- "Casserole" hereThe word originally named the vessel, and this recipe's own text asks only for a "mold, or baking pan" rather than a casserole dish. Any straight-sided ovenproof bowl, charlotte mold or loaf pan works, greased generously so the rice releases.
- Missing fractionsThe fractions for the pepper, onion juice and bread crumbs have dropped out of the printed text. Nothing in the recipe tells us what they were, so season the meat mixture to taste and add crumbs by feel — around half a cup is a reasonable guess for two cups of meat.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid, or press grated onion in a sieve. It gives onion flavor without visible pieces, which was the point in a molded dish meant to slice cleanly.
- Stock, added a spoonful at a time"Add meat stock to make mixture pack easily" means moist enough to hold a shape when squeezed, not wet. A quarter to a half cup for two cups of meat is a fair starting guess, though the recipe gives no figure. Too much and the filling weeps into the rice.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only "steam or bake about 45 minutes". A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere near 350F, suits it: the ingredients are already cooked, so this is only setting the egg and heating through. If steaming, set the covered mold in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up and hold the same time.
- Turning it outLet the mold stand 10 minutes off the heat before inverting. Run a thin knife around the edge, put the serving plate on top and turn the whole thing over in one movement.
- YieldSix cups of packed rice and meat serves five or six. The tomato sauce is not optional in practice — the dish is dry without it.
Molded rice borders and cases were a standard trick of late nineteenth and early twentieth century domestic cookery, a way of turning a cupful of yesterday's roast, boiled fowl or ham into a dish that looked deliberate at table. The molded shape did real work: it let a thrifty hash be brought in whole, sliced at the table, and sauced.