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Rice Apples
Boil half a pound rice in a custard-kettle till tender in one quart milk, sweetened with half tea-cup sugar; pare and core with apple corer seven or eight good-cooking apples, place in slightly buttered baking-dish, put a tea-spoon of jam or jelly into each cavity, and fill with rich cream; put the rice in around apples, leaving top uncovered; bake thirty minutes, then cover with the whites of two eggs, sift on sugar, and return to the oven for ten minutes. Serve with sweetened cream. -Mrs. S. M. Guy, Mechanicsburg.
A rice pudding built around whole cored apples, finished with a thin meringue. The method is sound; the vagueness is all in the oven and the apples.
- Custard-kettleA double boiler. The rice is cooked over water, not direct heat, so the milk does not scorch or the grains catch. A heavy saucepan on low heat works if it is stirred, but the original method is safer here.
- Rice and milk ratioHalf a pound is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of raw short- or medium-grain rice, to one quart of milk. Expect 45 minutes to an hour in a double boiler; the mixture should be thick and creamy but still loose, since it will dry further in the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits both stages; drop to 325F for the meringue if it is colouring too fast in the final ten minutes.
- Choose the apples for structure"Good-cooking apples" here most likely means a firm variety that holds its shape rather than one that collapses into sauce. Braeburn, Golden Delicious or Northern Spy should survive the baking whole; McIntosh will not. Medium apples of around 6 oz stand the best chance of cooking through in the stated time, and may still need longer; large ones will almost certainly be underdone.
- Rich creamHeavy or whipping cream. Poured into the cored cavity over the jam, it enriches the apple as it bakes. Fill just below the top or it will boil over into the rice.
- The meringueTwo whites for seven or eight apples is a thin covering. Beat them to soft-to-firm peaks before spreading; the recipe assumes you know this, and unbeaten whites will simply weep. "Sift on sugar" means dusting the surface, roughly a tablespoon.
- Yield and servingSeven or eight servings, one apple each with its surrounding rice. Best warm rather than hot, with cold sweetened cream poured at the table.
Baked apples stuffed with jam and set in rice belong to a familiar family of nineteenth-century rice-and-fruit desserts. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in Minneapolis in 1877 and expanded through many editions, gathered its recipes by contribution, which is why this one carries the name and town of the woman who sent it " a practice that made the book a kind of directory of Midwestern kitchens as much as a manual. The custard-kettle called for here was a common piece of equipment in those kitchens: on a wood range, where heat was hard to moderate, a water-jacketed pan was a dependable way to cook milk and rice together without scorching.