Rice Balls
Boil one cup of rice. When tender, drain, place in a double boiler, add one-half of a cupful of good light-colored stock to each pint of rice and a high seasoning of salt, pepper and onion juice. Cover and cook until the stock is absorbed. Add two well beaten eggs, cook a moment longer and take from the fire. When cold, make up into tiny balls; dip each into slightly beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs and fry brown in smoking hot deep fat.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in its own right — small fried rice croquettes meant to be dropped into clear broth or served alongside. The technique is sound; only a few details need translating.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe rice must be genuinely cold and stiff before shaping, or the balls slump in the fat and shed their coating. Spread the cooked mixture on a sheet pan, cover, and refrigerate at least two hours.
- Rice and stock quantitiesOne cup of raw rice yields roughly three cups cooked, so "one-half cupful of stock to each pint of rice" works out to about three-quarters of a cup of stock total. Add it in stages; the rice should drink it, not swim.
- "Light-colored stock"A pale chicken or veal stock, so the finished balls stay ivory rather than muddy brown. A good low-sodium chicken stock is the modern stand-in — season with salt yourself, since the recipe wants a high seasoning.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a microplane and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon or two is plenty. It gives the flavor without visible pieces, which is the point in a garnish.
- Choice of riceA short or medium grain rice binds far better than long grain. Arborio behaves the way the book expects; basmati will not hold together.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot deep fat" is the period's standard direction for deep frying; the recipe does not say what fat to use. Use a neutral oil at 375F and fry in small batches — the balls are already cooked, so they need only two to three minutes to color.
- Egg washThe two beaten eggs stirred into the hot rice will set as they cook, which is what binds the mixture. The additional "slightly beaten egg" for dipping is a separate egg; thin it with a spoonful of water so the crumbs adhere in a thin layer.
- YieldDepends on how small you shape them; the recipe asks for "tiny balls," so expect appreciably more than two dozen — enough to garnish six to eight bowls of soup. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
Fried rice balls turn up in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks under the general heading of soup garnishes, alongside quenelles, custard royale, marrow balls and forcemeat dumplings — small, showy additions to an otherwise plain clear broth, and a mark of a kitchen with time on its hands. The technique is straight out of the French croquette repertoire that dominated American cooking-school teaching in this period: bind a cooked starch with egg, chill it firm, crumb it and fry. Sicily's arancini and Roman supplì are built on the same principle, and the arancini are often said to descend from much older Sicilian practice, though there is no reason to think this book had them in mind. The instruction to use "light-colored stock" is telling — a consommé was judged partly on clarity and color, and a garnish that clouded or darkened it defeated the purpose.