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Pears, with Rice
Wash six ounces of best Carolina rice in two or three waters, put it into a saucepan with a quart of milk, some white sugar, and a quarter of a stick of vanilla, and let it simmer gently for an hour. Turn it upon a hot dish, and lay upon it four or five good baking pears which have been cored, halved, and stewed until quite tender with three pints of water, four ounces of sugar, and a quarter of a stick of vanilla. Boil the syrup in which the pears were stewed very quickly for a few minutes to thicken it, and pour it over the rice. Serve either hot or cold. Time, one hour and a half or more to stew the pears. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A milk-simmered rice moulded onto a dish with poached pears and their reduced syrup — the Victorian ancestor of riz à la condé. Two things in the original need translating: the rice variety and the enormous volume of poaching liquid.
- Carolina riceIn the nineteenth century this meant the long-grain white rice exported from the Carolina lowcountry, prized as the cleanest and whitest available. Any long-grain white rice works, though short-grain pudding rice gives the creamier, better-holding result modern cooks expect from a moulded pudding.
- Quantities in metricSix ounces of rice is about 170 g (a scant cup). The quart of milk is an imperial quart, 40 fl oz or roughly 1.1 litres — noticeably more than a US quart, and the extra liquid matters over an hour of simmering.
- VanillaA quarter of a stick is an inch or so of vanilla pod; split it so the seeds disperse, and fish it out before serving. Half a teaspoon of extract stirred in at the end is the usual substitute.
- Keeping the rice from catchingAn hour of gentle simmering in milk can scorch on a thin modern pan. Use the heaviest saucepan available over the lowest heat and stir often; the original gives no oven step, but a covered pan in a low oven, stirred every twenty minutes, is a modern alternative.
- Baking pearsThe recipe means firm cooking pears — Conference, Bosc, or any hard, slightly underripe fruit. Ripe Bartlett or Comice will collapse into sauce well before the stated hour and a half.
- The poaching liquidThree pints of water to four ounces of sugar is a very thin syrup, chosen so the pears poach submerged. Reducing that much liquid to a pourable sauce takes far longer than "a few minutes" — expect twenty to thirty minutes of hard boiling, and lift the pears out first so they do not overcook.
- ServingFour or five portions, as stated. Hot, it is a nursery pudding; cold, the rice firms up and the syrup glazes it. The ninepence given as the cost dates the entry as much as anything in it.
Cassell's places this among the plain milk puddings that formed the backbone of the English domestic sweet course, but the construction — a bed of vanilla rice under poached fruit, masked with its own reduced syrup — belongs to the French repertoire, where rice cooked in sweetened milk and dressed with fruit goes by the name riz à la condé. The specification of "Carolina rice" is a period marker: American long-grain from the Carolina and Georgia coast was a byword for quality in the British market, and cookery writers named it much as they named Jordan almonds or Patna rice, as much an indication of grade as of variety. Vanilla in a pod, bought by the stick and doled out an inch at a time, was still expensive enough to be measured that carefully. The pears are the other half of the economy — hard stewing varieties, useless raw, were cheap in autumn and repaid the long slow simmer this recipe gives them.