Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice and Macaroon Pudding
Rice and Macaroon Pudding
Wash a quarter of a pound of rice, and boil it in a pint and a half of milk till it is tender, and has absorbed the liquor. Boil with it the rind of half a lemon or three or four bitter almonds, to flavour it. Turn it into a basin to cool. Beat three ounces of fresh butter to cream. Mix with this three ounces of powdered sugar, and the well-beaten yolks of four eggs. Stir in the rice, and add the whites of the eggs whisked to a firm froth. Butter a pudding-mould rather thickly. Put in this a layer of rice, then a layer of macaroons, and repeat until the mould is full. Lay a buttered paper on the top of the pudding, tie it in a cloth, and steam until done enough. Turn it out carefully, and send raspberry or red currant sauce to table with the pudding. About three ounces of macaroons will be required. Time to steam the pudding, two hours. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian steamed mould pudding built in layers, closer to a rice soufflé than to nursery rice pudding. Two details decide whether it works: the rice must be dry enough to hold a shape, and the whites must be folded, not stirred.
- Bitter almondsDo not use them. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide. They cannot be sold as food in the US and are restricted or hard to obtain in much of Europe. The recipe offers lemon rind as the first alternative; use that, or a few drops of almond extract.
- The macaroonsThese are Victorian almond macaroons or ratafia biscuits — small, crisp, meringue-and-ground-almond bakes, not French macarons and not coconut haystacks. Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a modern shelf. Three ounces is about 85 g.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of rice is about 115 g; a pint and a half of milk in an English book of this date is 30 fl oz, roughly 850 ml. Use short-grain pudding rice and cook it until the milk is genuinely absorbed — a wet rice base will not hold the layers.
- Butter "beaten to cream"Softened butter creamed until pale, then the sugar and yolks worked in. Let the rice cool to barely warm before it goes in, or the yolks will scramble and the butter will split.
- Folding the whitesWhisk to a firm froth, not stiff peaks, and fold in with a large spoon in two additions. This is the pudding's lift; steaming will not rescue a deflated mixture.
- The mould and the clothThe recipe gives no mould size; allow around 2 litres for this quantity, and butter it thickly. In place of buttered paper tied in a cloth, use a pleated round of baking parchment topped with foil, tied or crimped tightly at the rim so no condensation gets in.
- SteamingStand the basin on a trivet in a deep pan, add boiling water to halfway up the sides, cover, and keep it at a bare simmer for the full two hours. Top up with boiling water as needed; letting the pan run dry is the usual failure.
- Turning out and servingRest the pudding five to ten minutes off the heat before inverting, or the hot centre will slump. Serve five or six, with a thin raspberry or redcurrant sauce — sieved fruit loosened with a little sugar syrup, poured round rather than over.
- "Probable cost, 1s. 9d."Cassell's, like other household books of the period, routinely printed a probable cost alongside the number served. It carries no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery belongs to the run of encyclopaedic household books produced around the turn of the twentieth century, arranged alphabetically, and its entries carry a probable cost and a number of persons served. The dish itself sits at the point where the cheap milk pudding met the company dessert: plain boiled rice, an everyday nineteenth-century nursery food, is enriched with butter, yolks and whisked whites and layered with almond macaroons to turn it into something worth unmoulding at table. Steaming in a buttered mould covered with paper and a tied cloth was a common technique of the period, and the bitter almond flavouring reflects a time when bitter kernels, or ratafia biscuits made with them, were a usual route to almond flavour — a practice since abandoned for the cyanogenic glycosides they contain. The fruit sauce is characteristic too: raspberry and redcurrant were both common household preserves.