Pineapple
1/3 cup rice well washed. 1 cup cold water. 1½ cups milk.
Yolks 3 eggs. 3/4 cup sugar. 2 cups whipping cream. 1/4 teaspoon salt.
PROCESS: Add cold water to rice and cook in double boiler thirty minutes. Drain, return to double boiler, add milk and cook until rice is tender, then rub through purée strainer. Beat egg yolks very light, add sugar and salt, then pour slowly on hot rice. Cook until mixture thickens, cool and half freeze. Then fold in the cream, whipped until stiff. Fill a round mould, pack in salt and ice, let stand two or three hours. Drain slices of canned pineapple; add one-half cup sugar to liquor and two shavings orange peel. Place on range and reduce slowly to a thick syrup. Cut slices of pineapples in half crosswise, lay them in syrup for two hours. Unmould pudding and garnish with the pineapple, placing cut side down. This menu would also prove very acceptable for a Thanksgiving Day Dinner.
A frozen rice custard, moulded and garnished with syruped pineapple — closer to French riz à l'impératrice than to a baked rice pudding. The whole thing stands or falls on the rice being sieved smooth before the custard goes in.
- The milk quantityThe printed page gives 1½ cups milk, as our text now reads. Cook the rice in enough milk to keep it loose and absorbent, adding more if it stiffens before the grains are tender.
- Sieve, don't mash"Rub through purée strainer" means pushing the hot cooked rice through a fine sieve with the back of a spoon, or a food mill on the finest plate. Skip it and the finished sweet is grainy. A blender or food processor will turn the starch gluey instead; use the sieve.
- Cook the custard gentlyThe yolk-sugar-rice mixture thickens in the top of the double boiler and should be pulled at the point it coats a spoon, around 175-180F. Direct heat will scramble it.
- "Half freeze" and the salt-and-ice mouldThe custard was churned or stirred until slushy, the whipped cream folded in, then the mould buried in a bucket of crushed ice layered with rock salt for two or three hours. In a modern kitchen, chill the custard thoroughly, fold in the whipped cream, pack it into a loaf pan or metal bowl lined with plastic, and freeze 3-4 hours. It is an unchurned semifreddo and will set firm without a machine.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate. If it resists, wring out a hot cloth and hold it against the metal rather than working a knife around the edge.
- The pineapple syrup"Liquor" is the canning syrup from the tin. Reduce it with the sugar and two pared strips of orange zest — no white pith — to a syrup that sheets off the spoon, then steep the halved slices in it off the heat. Canned slices are what the recipe calls for, and the drained slices hold their shape.
- TimingThe pineapple wants two hours in the syrup and the mould two to three in the freezer, so both can be done the morning of the dinner. The custard base is better made the day before.
- YieldTwo cups of cream plus the rice custard makes roughly six cups, about a 6-cup mould, and will serve eight to ten. It is rich; small slices are correct.
This is the frozen cousin of riz à l'impératrice, the moulded rice-and-custard sweet that came out of nineteenth-century French professional kitchens and was known to American cooks by the time Elizabeth O. Hiller assembled 52 Sunday Dinners. Two things place it in its period. One is the ice-and-salt mould: before household electric refrigeration, anything frozen meant a wooden bucket, crushed ice and coarse salt, and a cook willing to watch it. The other is the tin of pineapple. Hawaiian canneries had made pineapple slices in syrup a cheap, year-round staple by the early 1900s, and the recipe treats the canning liquor as an ingredient in its own right rather than something to pour away — a habit of thrift that runs through the whole book. The closing line notes that the menu "would also prove very acceptable for a Thanksgiving Day Dinner" — a remark about the whole Sunday menu rather than the dessert alone.