Take young pumpkins (about the size of your fist), scoop out their insides, and fill them with minced tunny fish preserved in oil, yolk of egg, a pinch of Parmesan cheese, a little of the soft pulp of the pumpkin, and a little allspice and pepper, but no salt. Cook the pumpkins in butter, and when brown serve with Tomato sauce (see Sauces, p. [126]).
Rice (How to cook).
Place a large sauce-pan with water on a hot fire; it is necessary that the water should boil violently in order to keep the grains of rice separate. Wash the rice in several waters so as to remove the floury coating, which makes it pasty. Drain, and drop it gradually into the sauce-pan, so as not to stop the boiling. Then boil hard for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. When the rice is soft to the touch, it is done. Then drain off every drop of water, sprinkle with salt, cover the sauce-pan with a thin napkin, and leave it by the fire to steam and get dry. (The rice can also be put into a cullender to drain, and then into an open oven to dry; or butter the interior of a stew-pan, put in the rice, put on the lid tight, and stand the pan on a trivet in the oven, or by the fire.)
Rice ‘alla Casalinga.’
Wash eight ounces of rice, and blanch it in a sauce-pan with two quarts of water for five minutes, then strain and let it cool. Meanwhile fry four ounces of lean bacon cut up into small pieces, and when browned, add one and a half pints of stock and a small teaspoonful of white pepper. Put in the rice, cook for twenty minutes, stirring every now and then, take it off the fire, add half a tumbler of Tomato sauce (see Sauces, p. [126]), or conserve, and mix well. Turn out the rice on to a hot dish, and garnish with small sausages.
Rice Croquettes.
Boil a cupful of rice in weak chicken broth, drain, stir in two beaten-up eggs, one teaspoonful of butter, a slight sprinkling of flour, pepper, and a pinch of grated lemon-peel. Flour your hands, and make the rice, when cold, into small sausages (or croquettes), roll each in raw egg, and then in bread crumbs, and fry to a golden brown.
Rice with Tomatoes. No. 1.
Boil one cupful of rice soft in hot water, shake it now and then, but do not stir it. Drain, and add a little milk in which a beaten egg has been mixed, one teaspoonful of butter, and a little pepper and salt. Simmer for five minutes, and if the rice has not absorbed all the milk, drain it again. Put the rice round a dish, smooth it into a wall, wash it over with the yolk of a beaten-up egg, and put it into the oven till firm. Take half a bottle of tomato conserve (or the strained juice and pulp of seven or eight tomatoes), season with pepper, a little salt, sugar, and half a chopped onion, stew for twenty minutes, then stir in one tablespoonful of butter and two tablespoonfuls of fine bread-crumbs. Stew three or four minutes to thicken, and then pour the tomato into the dish in the middle of the rice, and serve.