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Apricots (au Riz)
Put a cupful of rice in a saucepan with a quart of milk, a piece of butter the size of a nut, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and the rind of a lemon, Let all simmer gently, and when the milk is absorbed and the rice tender, add to it four well-beaten eggs. Boil up again, stirring all the time, to cook the eggs. Remove the lemon-rind. Put a gallipot in the middle of a large glass dish, and heap the rice round it; smooth it with the back of a spoon, and let it slope down to the edges of the dish. When it is cold, remove the gallipot, and place the apricots in the hollow, piling them pyramidically. They must be prepared thus: Take two dozen of the fresh fruit, sound and ripe: pare, stone, and slice them. Make a syrup of a breakfast-cupful of sugar and the juice of two lemons. When it is boiling, throw in the slices, and cook them quickly. A few of the kernels may be blanched and chopped and strewed over the fruit. Place a layer of apricot marmalade mixed with the syrup at the bottom of the hollow, and pile the stewed fruit on that. Time to stew the slices, five minutes. Probable cost, 4s. 6d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian moulded rice ring with stewed apricots heaped in the middle. Most of it is straightforward, but one instruction in the fruit garnish is the reason this page carries a caution.
- The apricot kernelsThe recipe offers an optional garnish: "a few of the kernels may be blanched and chopped and strewed over the fruit." Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or moistened; bitter kernels can carry several milligrams of cyanide each, and food safety authorities now advise against eating raw kernels at all. Omit the kernel garnish; the rest of the dish is unaffected by leaving it out.
- Why the kernels were thereApricot and peach kernels were long used in place of bitter almonds for the same marzipan-like aroma. That aroma comes from benzaldehyde, released when amygdalin breaks down - the same reaction that releases the cyanide; almond extract gives the flavour with none of the chemistry.
- GallipotA small straight-sided earthenware jar, originally for apothecaries' ointments. It is used here purely as a former: you heap the rice around it, let it set cold, then lift it out to leave a well. A straight-sided tumbler or ramekin filled the same role.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8-10 fl oz, so about a cup of sugar. The plain "cupful" of rice earlier is a separate, unstandardised household measure and the recipe does not say the two are the same vessel.
- Butter the size of a nutAn unstandardised household measure, usually read as walnut-sized: roughly a rounded teaspoon to a tablespoon. In a quart of milk it is there for richness and to keep the rice from catching, not for structure.
- Four beaten eggs in hot riceThis is a stirred custard bound with starch. The original adds the beaten eggs to the hot rice and then says "boil up again," with no tempering; whole eggs begin to set from about 160F, so eggs stirred straight into a pan that hot risk curdling rather than thickening.
- Probable cost and yieldFour shillings and sixpence was a substantial outlay for a supper sweet, and the two dozen fresh apricots would have been the bulk of it. The book gives six to eight servings, which is realistic for a quart of milk plus two dozen apricots.
A sweetened, lemon-scented rice heaped round a former and filled with stewed apricots. It belongs to the wider family of nineteenth-century moulded rice sweets that includes the French riz a l'imperatrice - though that dish is set with cream and gelatine rather than thickened with eggs, and is turned out of a mould, where this one is shaped around a gallipot. The construction lets a cheap grain and a quart of milk carry a smaller quantity of expensive fresh fruit. Apricots reached British tables from wall-trained trees in kitchen gardens as well as from imported supply. The use of apricot and peach kernels as a stand-in for bitter almonds is long attested in European confectionery; the toxicity of prussic acid from bitter almonds was already recognised in the nineteenth century, and kernels moved out of the kitchen as later toxicology quantified the risk.