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Apples and Rice
Put eight or nine good-sized apples, pared, cored, and sliced, into a saucepan with a little cinnamon, three ounces of sugar, a small piece of butter, and sufficient water to prevent burning. Allow them to simmer gently until reduced to a pulp, which must be spread at the bottom of a well-oiled pie-dish. Boil half a cupful of well-washed rice in a pint of milk, with a little cinnamon and sugar, until the milk is absorbed and the rice quite soft; then mix in the yolks of two eggs well beaten, and boil two or three minutes longer, stirring quickly. Pour over the apples, smooth it evenly, and place the dish in a quick oven to brown. Serve with sifted sugar. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 1s.
A straightforward baked pudding of apple pulp under a milk-rice topping. Two things decide whether it works: the apples must cook down to a genuine pulp with almost no free liquid, and the rice must be fully soft before the egg yolks go in.
- Apple quantityEight or nine "good-sized" apples is roughly 3 lb of whole fruit, perhaps 2 lb once pared and cored, and less again once cooked down. Use a cooking apple that collapses — Bramley, or a mix of tart eating apples — since a firm apple will stay in slices and leave the pudding wet.
- Three ounces of sugarAbout 6 tablespoons, or 85 g, for the apples. With Bramleys that is on the modest side; taste the pulp before it goes in the dish, as the rice layer is also sweetened.
- "Sufficient water to prevent burning"Two or three tablespoons is enough if the pan is covered and the heat low. Any more and you will need to drive it off again, since a loose apple layer will bleed up through the rice.
- Rice and milkHalf a cupful of rice to a pint of milk. Use a UK pint (20 fl oz) rather than a US one if the ratio matters to you; short-grain pudding rice absorbs it best. Expect 25–35 minutes of gentle simmering, stirring often, before the grains are truly soft.
- The egg yolksTake the pan off the heat for a moment before beating in the yolks, then return it for the two or three minutes specified, stirring constantly. Yolks dropped into a boiling pan will scramble in threads.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400–425°F (200–220°C), though the term was never precise. The pudding is already cooked through; the oven is only browning the top, which is why fifteen minutes is enough. A hot grill for a few minutes does the same job.
- "Well-oiled pie-dish"Here this simply means greasing the dish; butter will do the job as well as oil. A dish of about 1.5 quarts suits this volume.
- ServingFour or five, as stated. "Sifted sugar" is caster or icing sugar shaken over the browned surface just before it goes to the table.
Layering fruit under a milk-and-rice topping was one of the standard economical puddings of Victorian and Edwardian British cookery. Rice was cheap by the 1880s and endlessly stretched with milk and sugar; apples were the one fruit a town household could buy or store almost year-round. The "probable cost, 1s." is characteristic of Cassell's, which costed nearly every dish u2014 plausibly so that a mistress could check her cook's housekeeping u2014 and a shilling for a pudding serving five suggests a dish squarely aimed at the middle-class family table rather than the dinner party. The combination has close relatives across Europe, from French g u00e2teau de riz aux pommes to the German and Scandinavian rice-and-apple bakes, and no single origin can be claimed for it.