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Rice a la Maigre
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 grated shallot ½ cupful boiled rice 4 chopped hard-cooked eggs 1 tablespoonful white sauce 1 raw egg 1 cupful thick tomato sauce Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste 3 baked tomatoes 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Fry shallot in Crisco, then add rice, two of the hard-cooked eggs, white sauce, raw yolk of egg, and seasonings. Stir over fire till very hot, then turn out on to hot dish; pour over tomato sauce, sprinkle with parsley and garnish with remainder of eggs, and baked tomatoes.
A pan of hot rice bound with egg and served under tomato sauce — essentially a meatless supper dish from Procter & Gamble's 1913 promotional cookbook. Most of the work is in having the components ready before the rice hits the pan.
- Crisco and the fatCrisco here is plain hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though the modern formulation is no longer the cottonseed product of 1913. Butter or olive oil works better with shallot and tomato; 4 tablespoons is generous for 1½ cups of rice, and 2 is plenty.
- The hinge: fold, do not scrambleThe raw yolk is stirred through the hot rice so it thickens rather than sets in threads. The recipe says to stir over the fire till very hot; keep the heat low, stir constantly, and stop as soon as the rice looks glossy.
- "1 tablespoonful white sauce"That is not a sauce component but a binder — a spoonful of thick béchamel to hold the rice together alongside the yolk. Make it as a stiff roux-based sauce, or leave it out and rely on the yolk; a thin sauce will only make the rice sodden.
- Grated shallotGrating rather than chopping puts the shallot juice through the dish without leaving visible pieces. A fine mince is the modern equivalent, softened gently so it does not brown.
- Cupful and boiled riceA cupful in this book is the standard 8 fl oz measure. The 1½ cupfuls means cooked rice, not raw — about ½ cup of dry long-grain rice before boiling.
- Baked tomatoesThe book gives no method; presumably whole or halved tomatoes, seasoned and baked until collapsing — around 25–30 minutes at 375F in a modern oven. Start them before you begin the rice, as the finished dish must go to the table hot.
- PaprikaIn 1913 American paprika meant a mild, largely decorative sweet powder, used as much for colour on a pale dish as for flavour. Sweet Hungarian paprika is the closest match; smoked paprika will pull the dish somewhere it was not intended to go.
- YieldThree or four as a light main course, two if it is the centre of the meal. It does not reheat well — the egg tightens and the rice dries.
À la maigre is French kitchen shorthand for "lean" — a dish made without meat, for the fast days and meatless Fridays that shaped a great deal of European cookery. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco, the 1913 cookbook Procter & Gamble issued to introduce hydrogenated cottonseed shortening to American kitchens, is not accidental. Crisco was marketed hard on the fact that it contained no animal fat at all: useful to cooks observing meatless days, and famously promoted to kosher households, since a vegetable shortening was neither meat nor dairy. Meatless dishes let the company demonstrate that point over and over, with the product name printed in the ingredient list every time. The recipes themselves, generally credited to Marion Harris Neil, are conventional Anglo-French home cooking of the period — white sauce, hard-cooked eggs, a tomato sauce poured over — with lard giving way to the new shortening.