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Glace Napolitain
Take four ounces of Carolina rice, wash it thoroughly, and put it in a stewpan over a slow fire with a pint of milk, a pint of good cream, a pinch of salt, and two ounces of sugar. Let the rice swell considerably in this. When it is tender enough to give way between the fingers, add a stick of good vanilla, and boil it one minute, then let it get cold. When cold, take all the cream that remains unabsorbed, and put it in a stewpan with the beaten yolks of six eggs; if there is not cream enough, add to it a little milk. Stir this on the fire with a wooden spoon, and when the eggs are well done, and the mixture very thick, let it cool. Add to this a pint of double-whipped cream, and after mixing the cream with the custard, taste if the latter is sweet enough. Do not make it too sweet. Then take some out in a basin, and put it into the rice only, not into the freezing-pot; next mix together the rice and cream, take out the vanilla, and put all the rest into the freezing-pot; work it well in the ice. When quite frozen, put it in ice-moulds that shut on both sides; put them in the pail with salt all round the ice. At dinner-time dip the moulds in cold water, and push the glace off the moulds, and cover it with the remainder of cream.
This is a frozen rice custard — essentially a churned riz à l'impératrice — and it depends on getting the rice soft enough to disappear into the cream. A few points of translation before you start.
- Carolina riceAmerican rice grown in South Carolina, the standard rice of Victorian puddings, though the historic Carolina varieties were long-grain rather than medium. Arborio or any modern pudding rice works here.
- The hinge: cook the rice to collapse"Tender enough to give way between the fingers" is the whole instruction. Rice that is merely al dente will freeze into hard grains. Expect 35-45 minutes over a low flame, stirring so the milk does not catch.
- VanillaA stick of vanilla is a whole pod, added near the end, boiled for the minute the recipe specifies and then left to infuse as the rice cools. It is fished out before churning. Two teaspoons of extract will do but gives a flatter flavour.
- The custard stage"When the eggs are well done, and the mixture very thick" means a stirred custard at about 180F, thick enough to coat the spoon. Anything hotter and it scrambles; keep the pan on gentle heat and pull it off early rather than late.
- Double-whipped creamHeavy cream whipped to soft-to-medium peaks, folded in for lightness. The recipe's closing 'remainder of cream' is ambiguous, but appears to mean cream held back to mask the turned-out ice at the table.
- SweetnessThe warning not to over-sweeten is worth heeding for the opposite reason to the one you might expect: cold suppresses sweetness, so a mixture that tastes correct warm will taste bland frozen. Taste it cold, not hot.
- Freezing-pot and ice-mouldsThe freezing-pot is a pewter or tin canister turned in a pail of ice and coarse salt. Use an ice-cream machine. The hinged moulds, buried in salted ice to firm up, correspond to any lidded metal mould or loaf tin hardened in the freezer for several hours.
- Unmoulding and yieldThe brief dip in cold water is enough; do not use warm water or the surface melts to slush. As written this makes roughly a quart and a half — eight to ten servings — and it is best eaten the day it is made, as the rice firms up considerably after a night in a modern freezer.
"Napolitain" in Victorian ice work usually pointed back to Naples, long credited as the source of the fashion for moulded and layered ices that spread through French and English confectionery — the same association that gave us Neapolitan ice cream in its striped form. What Cassell's describes here, though, is closer to the French riz à l'impératrice: a vanilla-scented rice and custard cream, ordinarily set with gelatine and served chilled, here churned and moulded instead. The elaborate business of hinged moulds buried in salted ice belongs to a period before mechanical refrigeration, when ice was cut in winter, stored in ice-houses and sold through the summer, and when an ice at the end of dinner was a visible statement about a household's resources.Cassell's assumes a kitchen with a pail, rough salt, a supply of block ice and someone willing to turn the pot for half an hour.</p>