Home › The Principles of Cookery › RICE AND APPLES (another way)
RICE AND APPLES (another way)
Boil six ounces of rice in a quart of milk till tender; sweeten and flavour agreeably. Pare six or eight medium-sized apples, scoop out the cores, and fill the cavities with sugar, butter, and lemon-rind. Lay the apples in a thickly-buttered dish, and put the rice round them. Brush the surface with yolk of egg, and sift powdered sugar thickly over it. Place the dish in a brisk oven, and bake the preparation until the apples are tender and the rice is brightly browned. Serve hot or cold. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
RICE AND APPLES (another way). (See APPLES AND RICE.)
A baked rice pudding with whole cored apples set into it — straightforward once you translate the oven and the imperial measures.
- "Brisk oven"Brisk means hot, somewhere in the region of 400-450F by modern reckoning. At that heat for a full hour the top will likely scorch before the apples soften; bake at 375-400F and give it the stated hour, or start hot for ten minutes to set the glaze and drop to 350F.
- Imperial quartA British quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups. Six ounces of rice is a scant cup. The rice should be tender and thick but still loose enough to spoon around the apples — add more milk if it stiffens too far.
- Which riceUse a short-grain pudding rice or arborio. Long-grain will stay separate and never bind the dish.
- Which applesThe recipe says only "medium-sized apples", and they are pared before baking. A soft cooker will collapse over an hour; if you want the apples to hold their shape as whole domes in the rice, use a firmer variety -- Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Cox.
- "Sweeten and flavour agreeably"About 3 tablespoons sugar to this quantity of milk, plus a strip of lemon peel, a split vanilla pod or a scrape of nutmeg infused while the rice cooks. Fish the peel or pod out before assembling.
- Filling the coresScoop from the stem end and leave the base intact so the sugar and butter do not run out. Roughly a teaspoon each of sugar and butter per apple, with finely grated lemon rind rather than strips.
- The egg wash and sugarBrush only the rice, thinly — a heavy coat of yolk sets rubbery. The sifted sugar is what gives the "bright" browned crust; a shallow dish and a wide surface help it form.
- YieldFive or six as the original says. Good cold, when the rice firms enough to cut into wedges.
Cassell's carried several versions of rice and apples, cross-referencing them under both names, which tells you how thoroughly milk-and-rice puddings had colonised the Victorian middle-class table. Rice arrived in British kitchens as an expensive spiced dish in the medieval period, and by the nineteenth century cheap imports and cheap sugar had made it the standard nursery and second-course pudding. The costing here is for six people: this is a filling sweet course built from milk, a handful of grain and a few apples, dressed up with an egg glaze and a sugar crust so it could reasonably be sent to table. Baking whole cored apples stuffed with butter and sugar is older still, and they were sometimes set in a bed of something starchy, whether rice, sago or breadcrumbs, so that one dish might serve as both fruit and pudding.