Home › The Principles of Cookery › Jelly, Rice
Jelly, Rice
Mix four ounces of rice-flour smoothly and gradually with a quart of cold milk; put this into a saucepan with a quarter of an ounce of clarified insinglass, the thin rind of half a lemon, four bitter almonds, blanched and pounded, and four ounces of sugar. Boil and stir briskly until quite thick. Take out the lemon-rind, and pour the mixture into a damp mould. When it is firmly set, turn it on a glass dish, pour melted currant jelly, or any fruit syrup, round it, and send a jug of cream to table with it. Time, five minutes after boiling. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the sauces. Sufficient for five or six persons.
This is a Victorian moulded milk pudding stiffened with isinglass, and one of its five ingredients is no longer treated as food. The notes below explain the problem and decode the rest of the vocabulary.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and stirring into milk does. A single bitter almond can carry several milligrams of cyanide, and the toxic dose for a child is small. Their sale for eating is prohibited or tightly restricted in the United States and much of Europe, and the boiling here is neither long nough nor hot enough to be relied on to drive off the gas.
- Why no substitution is givenThe almonds are not a garnish in this pudding; they are the whole of its flavour alongside the lemon peel. Anyone wanting a rice-flour blancmange of this type should work from a current recipe rather than patching this one.
- IsinglassA collagen gelatine made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in leaf or shred form and clarified by soaking and straining before use. It has been almost entirely displaced by leaf and powdered gelatine; the quarter-ounce here is a setting agent, working with the starch rather than instead of it.
- Rice-flourFinely milled white rice, not ground rice (which is coarser) and not the glutinous rice flour sold for Asian sweets. Four ounces to a quart of milk is a stiff starch set, which is why the mould turns out cleanly.
- Quart and the mouldA British quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres. "Damp mould" means rinsed with cold water and not dried, so the film of water lets the set pudding drop free.
- "Time, five minutes after boiling"Rice starch needs sustained heat and constant agitation to gelatinise fully and lose its raw taste; five minutes of brisk stirring after it comes to the boil is the figure given, the recipe's own cue being that the mixture is "quite thick".
- Cost and yieldEightpence for a dish serving five or six places this among the cheap nursery and supper sweets of the period. The price is quoted exclusive of the currant jelly and the cream.
Rice-flour moulds sit in the long English family of blancmanges — literally "white food" — that runs from medieval almond-and-capon dishes through to the cornflour shapes of the twentieth century. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and after, the almond had shrunk from the body of the dish to a flavouring, and the thickening had passed to cheap milled starches: rice-flour, arrowroot, cornflour, sago. Bitter almonds were then a standard grocer's item, used in ratafias, macaroons and custards for the marzipan note that sweet almonds lack, and Victorian cookbooks call for them by the piece with no more comment than they give to lemon rind. Their danger was known to chemists — prussic acid poisoning from almond flavourings was documented across the nineteenth century — but the domestic trade only tightened much later, which is why period recipes read so casually. Isinglass, the other dated ingredient, was the prestige setting agent before commercial gelatine became reliable and cheap; it was sold clarified or to be clarified at home, and its expense is one reason the starch is doing most of the work here.