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Rice Dumplings
One cupful of rice washed until white, then steam it with one and one half cups of water, and two cups milk with one teaspoonful salt. In the mean time steam some good sour apples, have about one pint of the apple sauce; when done wet tea cups with cold water, then put in two tablespoons of the rice, one tablespoonful of the apple-sauce, then two more of the rice. When ready to serve, turn them out, and eat with soft custard, or sweetened cream.
A steamed rice pudding moulded in teacups around a core of apple sauce. Nothing here is dangerous or obsolete, but the method assumes habits a modern cook has to reconstruct.
- The hinge: cook the rice until it is stickyThe moulds hold their shape only because the starch in the rice binds as it cools. Use a short or medium grain rice, not long grain or converted rice, and let the mixture sit until thick before packing the cups.
- "Steam it" means covered and gentleThe liquid ratio given (1 cup rice to 1 1/2 cups water plus 2 cups milk) is enough for a slow covered simmer of 30 to 40 minutes, or a double boiler if you want no risk of catching. Milk on direct heat scorches; stir it, or steam the covered bowl over water as the original intends.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt for one cup of rice reads high for a dessert. A half teaspoon suits modern palates better, and the sauce or cream served alongside carries most of the flavour.
- Sour applesThe period meant a tart cooking apple. Granny Smith, Bramley or Northern Spy give the acidity the recipe relies on; sweet supermarket eating apples will make the whole dish flat. No sugar is specified for the sauce, so sweeten it to taste.
- Wetting the cupsRinsing the teacups in cold water is the release mechanism, standing in for buttering. Wet them again between each dumpling and unmould while the rice is still warm and pliable, not cold and set hard.
- Soft custardThis is a stirred pouring custard, not a baked one: egg yolks, milk, sugar, cooked over low heat until it coats a spoon. "Sweetened cream" is simply cream with sugar stirred in, poured cold.
- YieldAt two tablespoons of rice, one of apple sauce and two more of rice per cup, one cupful of raw rice and a pint of apple sauce will fill a good many more moulds than a small household would want at one sitting; scale down if you do not need a large batch. Best eaten the day they are made, as refrigeration turns the rice grainy.
Moulded rice puddings like this belong to a long line of thrifty nineteenth-century desserts that use rice and milk to stretch a small amount of fruit into a full course. Rice arrived in American kitchens cheaply through the Carolina and later Gulf trade, and by the second half of the century cookbooks treated it as an everyday pantry staple rather than a luxury, giving it as a breakfast cereal, a thickener and a pudding base. Calling these "dumplings" is a loose use of the word: there is no dough and no boiling in a cloth, only the shape and the enclosed filling that a true apple dumpling would have had in pastry. The instruction to serve with soft custard or sweetened cream, rather than a sauce made expressly for it, is characteristic of household books of this kind, which assume a jug of cream or a stirred custard is already on hand.