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RAMAZAN CAKES (a Turkish recipe)
Take half a pound of rice-flour, and dilute it with two glasses of milk; pass the preparation through a sieve into a stewpan. Boil over a moderate fire, stirring all the time. Add sugar to taste, let it reduce for seven or eight minutes, then add a few drops of extract of roses or of jessamine; turn it out on a round baking-sheet, previously moistened with cold water. Let the preparation be nearly an inch in thickness, and smooth its surface. When it is cold, sprinkle it with fine sugar, and divide it into small cakes, lozenge-shaped, round or oblong, according to taste.
This is a stiff rice-flour milk pudding, set in a sheet and cut into lozenges — the Ottoman family of sweets built on rice flour, milk and flower water. The Victorian text leaves the liquid quantity vague, which is the one thing worth settling before you start.
- The milk is under-specified"Two glasses" in a nineteenth-century English text is usually taken as something between a wineglass and a tumbler each, so anywhere from about 1 to 2 1/2 cups in total. Against half a pound of rice flour (roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups) that gives a very thick batter, and you may well need considerably more milk to get something pourable that will still reduce to a sliceable paste. Treat the original ratio as a starting point, not a measurement.
- Rice-flour, not ground riceUse finely milled white rice flour. Coarse ground rice gives a gritty set, and glutinous (sweet) rice flour behaves quite differently — it turns gummy and stretchy rather than sliceable.
- Sieving the slurryPassing the diluted flour through a sieve into the pan is not optional garnish; rice flour lumps instantly in milk and the lumps will not cook out. Whisk it into cold milk first, then strain.
- "Moderate fire" and the hingeMedium heat, constant stirring, and cook well past the point where it first thickens — seven or eight minutes of active bubbling. Rice flour tastes raw and chalky if pulled early, and a paste that has not reduced enough will slump instead of holding a clean lozenge edge.
- Flower waters"Extract of roses" and "of jessamine" mean concentrated flower essences, far stronger than the rosewater sold today. With modern rosewater you will want a tablespoon or two rather than a few drops; with a true food-grade essence, a few drops is right. Add it off the heat, since the aromatics flash off.
- Setting the sheetWetting the tray with cold water keeps the paste from gripping. Spread it a scant inch thick, smooth with a wet palette knife, and let it cool completely — several hours, or overnight in the refrigerator — before sugaring and cutting. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water for clean edges.
- KeepingYield depends entirely on how much milk you settle on and how large you cut the lozenges. They are a fresh sweet, not a keeping one: dairy-based and best within two days, refrigerated, though they firm and dry as they sit.
The name points straight at Ramazan, the Turkish form of Ramadan, when sweets of this kind are eaten after the fast is broken — the family of rice-flour and milk puddings known in Turkish as muhallebi, whose ancestors run back through Arab and Persian cooking. Setting the paste firm enough to cut into lozenges rather than serving it soft in a dish is what turns pudding into confectionery, and rose is the standard Ottoman flavouring, distilled flower waters being as ordinary in that kitchen as vanilla became in the English one. Its appearance in a late-Victorian recipe book reflects the period's appetite for foreign recipes collected as curiosities, printed with a parenthetical nationality. Here the occasion is the whole point, and the book does not mention it.