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Border of Rice
(Toulouse.) Boil and mash 1 1/2 pounds of rice, add 1 ounce of butter, and press it into a ring-shaped mould. Bake it like a custard, and turn out on a dish. Make a ragout or stew of 1 cup of white stock, 1/2 cup of cream or milk, yolk of an egg, seasoning, 1 pair of boiled and sliced sweetbreads, and 6 mushrooms, cut up. Cook this until smooth, and pour into the circle of rice. Serve hot.
A ring of baked rice filled with a creamy sweetbread ragout — a classic bordure de riz. Two things decide whether it works: the rice must be dry enough to hold a shape, and the sauce must never boil once the yolk goes in.
- The yolk is the hingeBeat the yolk with a spoonful of the hot cream, stir it back into the sauce off the heat, and keep the pan below a simmer while it thickens. A boil after the yolk is added scrambles it and the ragout turns grainy.
- Scale the rice downOne and a half pounds is roughly 3 1/2 cups of raw rice, which cooks up to well over two quarts — far more than any ring mould holds. About 1 1/2 cups raw (10 oz) plus the butter fills a 6-cup ring generously; the original quantity would serve a table of a dozen or more.
- "Boil and mash" means soft, not soupyCook the rice in stock or salted water until quite tender, then drain thoroughly and mash to a stiff paste. Any free liquid will weep in the mould and the border will collapse when turned out.
- "Bake it like a custard"Most likely an instruction to set it in a water bath: butter the ring mould, pack the rice in firmly, stand it in a roasting pan with hot water halfway up, and bake in a moderate oven (in modern terms somewhere around 325-350F) until firm to the touch — the recipe gives no heat or time, so judge by feel. Note that the recipe binds the rice with butter alone; an egg would help it hold, but the recipe does not call for one.
- Turning outLet it rest five minutes, run a knife round the edge, invert onto a warm platter and lift the mould straight up. A cold platter will make the rice stick and tear.
- Sweetbreads take preparationVeal sweetbreads want several hours of soaking in cold water with changes, then a blanch of about 5 minutes, a plunge into ice water, peeling of the outer membrane, and pressing under a weight until cold before slicing. Order them ahead from a butcher; a pair is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb.
- White stock and mushroomsWhite stock is unroasted veal or chicken stock — pale, mild, lightly gelatinous. "Six mushrooms" means about 4 oz of white or cremini; sweat them in butter first so their water does not thin the sauce.
- YieldAt the reduced rice quantity, six servings as a first course or four as a light main. Serve immediately — a rice border firms and dulls as it cools.
The parenthetical "(Toulouse.)" is doing real work here: sweetbreads, mushrooms and a pale cream sauce are the signature of garniture a la toulousaine, a nineteenth-century French kitchen formula in which poached sweetbreads, mushrooms, chicken quenelles and often cockscombs are bound in a velout he yolk-thickened white sauce this recipe reproduces in miniature. Serving it inside a moulded bordure de riz was one common way of handling a loose ragout on a flat plate, and it survived into English and American cookbooks well past 1900 as a showy way to present a small quantity of expensive offal. The sweetbread itself has since retreated to specialist butchers, which is the main reason the dish reads as exotic now and did not then.