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Rock Cream
Boil one cup rice in a custard-kettle in sweet milk until soft, add two table-spoons loaf-sugar, a salt-spoon salt; pour into a dish and place on it lumps of jelly; beat the whites of five eggs and three -table-spoons pulverized sugar to a stiff froth, flavor to taste, add one table-spoon rich cream, and drop the mixture on the rice. - Miss Libbie S. Wilcox, Madison.
A rice pudding built on the same plan as a floating island: soft milk-cooked rice, dabs of jelly, and peaks of sweetened egg-white froth. The froth is the problem — it is beaten raw and dropped onto rice that has already left the heat, so the whites are never cooked at all.
- Why this one failsThe five beaten whites are neither baked, poached, nor cooked over hot water; the warm rice underneath will not bring them anywhere near a temperature that eliminates Salmonella. Use a current recipe if you want this dessert.
- Custard-kettleA double boiler — an inner pan set over simmering water in an outer one. It appears here because milk and rice scorch easily over direct heat, and a wood range of the period offered little in the way of a low setting.
- Loaf-sugarRefined sugar sold as a hard cone or loaf, chipped off with sugar nippers. It is ordinary white sugar in a different shape; the two tablespoons are a measure of volume from broken lumps, so it is an approximate quantity at best.
- Salt-spoonThe small spoon sold with Victorian salt cellars and cruet stands, generally reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon.
- Pulverized sugarPeriod powdered sugar, ground finer than granulated but coarser than modern confectioners' sugar and without cornstarch. Confectioners' sugar is the nearest equivalent.
- Lumps of jellyFirm fruit jelly — currant was a common choice in period American cookery — spooned on in dabs rather than spread. It supplies the only acidity in an otherwise very mild dish.
- ScaleA cup of raw rice cooked soft in milk plus five whites makes a large dish, enough for six to eight.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) was assembled from recipes signed by named contributors across the state, which is why this one carries Miss Libbie S. Wilcox of Madison rather than an author's byline. Rock cream belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century desserts — floating island, snow eggs, whipped syllabub — that got their effect from beaten egg white heaped into peaks, and the name is generally taken to describe the craggy white drifts sitting on the rice below. Rice boiled slowly in milk was a standing item in American household books of the period: cheap, filling, and forgiving of a slow range, and easily dressed up for company with jelly and a froth of whites and sugar. The recipe leaves the flavoring open, instructing only that the cook "flavor to taste."