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Rice and Apple Cake
Take half a pound of rice, boil it in milk till tender and in a thick mass, adding sugar, grated lemon-peel, and a cupful of peach-water, or flavour with two spoonfuls of orange-flower water and one ounce of pounded bitter almonds. Stir the mixture well, that it may not burn. Peel twelve large apples, slice them thin, and stew them in a glassful of wine and a little water, adding some sugar and grated lemonpeel. Let them stew till they become a fine marmalade. When the apples and rice are both cold, take a cake-form, cover it thinly with rice, spread the apples over it, spread rice again about the thickness of a quarter of an inch, then apples, and so on, the last layer being rice. Set the cake in the oven for a quarter of an hour, turn it out when cold, and send to table with punch or custard sauce poured over it.
The structure of this pudding is straightforward, but two of its flavourings are cyanogenic and are the reason the recipe cannot be made as printed.
- The bitter almondsOne ounce of pounded bitter almonds is the hinge, and it is why this dish should not be made as printed. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted; an ounce is a large quantity, and neither boiling the rice nor a quarter of an hour in the oven can be relied on to drive it off. Bitter almonds are restricted or banned for retail sale in many countries for exactly this reason.
- Peach-waterThe alternative flavouring is no better. Peach-water was distilled or infused from peach kernels and peach leaves, both of which carry the same amygdalin chemistry as bitter almonds. A cupful is a large quantity of it, and nineteenth-century texts themselves carried warnings about the strength of home-made kernel waters.
- What to do insteadUse a current recipe for a layered rice and apple mould. We are not going to supply substituted quantities here, because the printed proportions are the problem, not the technique.
- Reading the rest of the methodFor context only: "a fine marmalade" means the apples cooked down to a thick, spreadable pulp rather than anything involving citrus, and a "cake-form" is a plain deep tin or mould, not a modern springform with a loose base. "A glassful of wine" is not a precise measure; a wineglassful was conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz.
- The oven stageFifteen minutes is not a baking time in any real sense — both components go into the mould already cooked and cold, so the oven is only setting the layers together.
- Punch sauceThe sauce named at the end is a sweet spirit-based pouring sauce, usually rum or arrack with sugar, lemon and sometimes egg yolk. Custard is offered as the plainer option.
Moulded puddings of milk-boiled rice layered with stewed fruit are often said to have been a staple of German and Austrian household cookery, and English books of the later nineteenth century appear to have absorbed a good many of them. The flavourings are the period signature: orange-flower water, peach-water and pounded bitter almonds were commonly reached for in anything wanting a marzipan-like perfume, and they appear across confectionery, custards and cordials of the era. Bitter almonds and kernel waters were understood to be strong — writers advised using them sparingly — but the mechanism was poorly grasped, and quantities that read as ordinary in 1880 read as alarming now, which is why a recipe like this survives in print with no warning attached.