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Rice, Apple
Boil four ounces of rice in milk, with sugar and lemon-peel chopped fine, till it becomes tender. Peel and core six apples, let them simmer in sugar and water with the juice of a lemon till they are so tender that a fork will easily pass through them; then take them off and let them drain. Make in the same syrup reduced, a marmalade with four apples, which is to be mixed with the rice, and the yolks of three eggs. Spread this marmalade on a baking-dish; place the six apples in it in such a manner that the hollow part will be uppermost and even with the rice; bake them in a moderate oven. The moment before serving, fill the centre of the apples with apricot marmalade, or any other preserve you please. Or you may make the foundation entirely of apple marmalade, filling the apples with preserves when you place them in the dish, and masking the whole with rice.
A Victorian moulded apple-and-rice pudding built in three parts: poached whole apples, a stiff apple purée bound with egg, and a milk-cooked rice. The vocabulary is the main obstacle.
- "Marmalade" means apple puréeIn this book marmalade is any fruit cooked down to a thick, spreadable mass, not a citrus preserve. The four apples are stewed in the reduced poaching syrup until they collapse and can be beaten smooth.
- Milk quantity is left to youFour ounces of rice is a scant two-thirds of a cup; it will absorb roughly two to two and a half cups of milk before it is tender. Add the milk in stages and stop while the rice is still creamy rather than dry, since it stiffens further with the egg yolks and in the oven.
- Lemon-peelPared zest, finely chopped, and no white pith. Modern practice is to add it in a strip and remove it, or to use finely grated zest, which needs no chopping.
- Choose apples that hold their shapeThe six whole apples must survive coring, poaching and baking intact. A firm variety such as Braeburn, Boskoop or Golden Delicious works; anything that falls to sauce belongs in the purée instead.
- Poach gently, drain thoroughlyA bare simmer keeps the apples whole, and the fork test is the right one. Draining matters more than the original implies: wet apples will thin the purée and weep into the dish.
- Egg yolks off the heatBeat the three yolks into the purée-and-rice mixture once it has cooled below scalding, or they will scramble before the dish reaches the oven.
- A moderate ovenBroadly equivalent to about 350F. You are setting the egg and colouring the surface, not cooking the fruit again, which is already tender, so bake only until the surface is set and lightly coloured.
- The preserve goes in lastApricot jam is spooned into the hollows the moment before serving, as directed. In the alternative version the apples are filled with preserve when they are placed in the dish and the whole is masked with rice.
- YieldSix apples, six servings. The recipe does not specify the size of the baking-dish.
This is the French entremets pommes au riz in English dress: rice cooked in sweetened milk used as a bed or a mask for poached whole fruit, finished with a spoonful of jam. The entry casually assumes the reader can make a fruit purée, a syrup and a rice bound with yolks and assemble the three. The looser sense of marmalade used here — any fruit boiled to a thick mass, from the Portuguese marmelada, quince paste — was still ordinary English in the period, and only later narrowed to the citrus conserve. Apples were the obvious fruit for it: stored through the winter months, and cheap enough that a recipe could spend ten of them on one dish.