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Rice and Almond Mould
Wash six ounces of best Carolina rice in one or two waters. Drain it and put it into a perfectly clean saucepan with a quart of milk, three table-spoonfuls of sugar, two ounces of sweet almonds, and four bitter ones, which have been blanched and pounded to a smooth paste. Simmer the rice gently until it is quite tender. Beat it for two or three minutes with a wooden spoon, and press it into a damp mould. Let it stand in a cold place for four or five hours. Turn it out carefully, ornament it with bright-coloured jam or jelly of any kind, pour a quarter of a pint of cream or good custard over it, and it is ready for serving. Time to simmer the rice, a little more than an hour. Probable cost, 9d., exclusive of the cream and jam. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The problem here is not the rice but the four bitter almonds, which are the flavouring the whole mould is built around. That single ingredient puts the recipe out of reach.
- Bitter almonds are the issueBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them to a paste and stirring them into milk does. Victorian cooks used them for the almond-and-marzipan aroma that sweet almonds lack.
- Dose is not controllableThe cyanide yield of a bitter almond varies widely with variety, growing conditions and size, so "four bitter ones" is not a measured quantity in any modern sense. A recipe that cannot state its dose of a toxic compound cannot be scaled, halved or served to children with any confidence.
- Simmering is not a safeguardHydrogen cyanide is volatile and long cooking drives some of it off, but the rice is simmered covered in milk and the loss is neither complete nor predictable. Treating an hour on the stove as detoxification is not a safe assumption.
- They are not sold as foodRaw bitter almonds are prohibited from sale for eating in the United States and restricted in many other countries, so the ingredient is not legitimately available to a home cook in the first place.
- Substitution changes the recipeBitter almond flavour is not the same thing as extra sweet almonds, and the mould without it is a plain rice blancmange. If that is what you want, work from a current rice mould or riz à l'impératrice recipe rather than adapting this one.
- Carolina riceFor context, "Carolina rice" in a British book of this date means a long-grain white rice sold under that name, valued for cooking soft and swelling well in milk; by this period the name was increasingly used as a trade description and not only as a statement of origin.
Moulded rice puddings turned out cold and glazed with jam sat at the cheap end of the Victorian sweet course: filling, made from storecupboard staples, and impressive on the table for a few pence, as the note of "probable cost, 9d." makes plain. The almond element links it to the older family of blancmanges, which were originally thickened with ground almonds long before cornflour and gelatine took over. Bitter almonds — and, later, commercial almond essence — were a common way of getting a pronounced marzipan note into English puddings, ratafias and macaroons in the nineteenth century; their toxicity was known but treated casually, and it was only later food-safety regulation that pushed them off the domestic shelf in favour of controlled extracts.