Boil ½ cup of rice in 1 quart of milk; add salt to taste; boil until very soft. Beat the yolks of 3 eggs with 4 tablespoonfuls of sugar and stir in the rice. Flavor with rose-water and put in a well-buttered pudding-dish. Beat the whites with pulverized sugar to a stiff froth; spread on the custard and let bake in the oven until done. Serve cold.
A milk-rice pudding under a meringue cap, written in the telegraphic style of a page-a-day book. Two things are left to you: the oven temperature and how much rose-water.
- Rice and milkHalf a cup of short or medium-grain white rice to a quart of whole milk. Long-grain will cook but stays separate; the pudding depends on the grains breaking down and thickening the milk.
- "Boil" means simmerA quart of milk at a true boil will scorch on the bottom and climb the pan. Keep it at a bare simmer over low heat, stirring often, 35-45 minutes until the grains collapse.
- Temper the yolksThe instruction to "stir in the rice" is safest done the other way: beat yolks and sugar, then add a ladle of the hot rice to the eggs first, then return everything to the pan off the heat. Poured cold into hot rice, the yolks can scramble.
- Rose-waterNo quantity is given. One to two teaspoons is enough for this volume; modern rose-water and rose extract vary widely in strength, so add half, taste, and stop before it turns soapy.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperature, only "until done." For a meringue-topped pudding a moderate oven, around 325F for 15-20 minutes, until the peaks are set and lightly browned, will do; too hot and the meringue is apt to weep and bead.
- The meringuePulverized sugar was a fine-ground sugar, closest to today's superfine (caster) sugar; confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch, is a rougher equivalent. Roughly 2 tablespoons per white. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which helps stop it shrinking away as it bakes.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 1½-quart baking dish. Serves six as written.
- Serving coldChill the pudding but expect the meringue to soften after a few hours in the refrigerator. It is at its best a couple of hours after baking, cool rather than cold.
Vienna's contribution to the nineteenth-century dessert repertoire was largely built on milk, eggs and sugar, and baked rice puddings under meringue appear across Austrian and southern German cookery as Reisauflauf or, sweetened and cooled, as a plain Milchreis dressed up for the table. Rose-water places the recipe in an older tradition than vanilla: distilled flower waters were the standard perfume for sweet dishes in European kitchens for centuries and were still ordinary pantry stock around the turn of the century, by which time vanilla and lemon are generally said to have been displacing them in American households. The book itself belongs to a genre popular around that period, a dish a day for a year with each one tagged to a nation, which taught readers less about Vienna than about the pleasant idea of eating one's way around the map from a home kitchen.