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Rice, Creamed
Take half a pound of rice, wash and pick it; parboil and strain; season with pepper and slat; pour over it a quart of soup or of good veal stock; let it boil two hours and pass it through a tamis.
A cream-of-rice soup base rather than a rice pudding: the rice is cooked to collapse in stock and then forced through a sieve. A few of the original's terms and proportions need translating.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve of fine woven cloth or mesh; the rice is pushed through with a wooden pestle or the back of a ladle. A fine-mesh conical strainer works, or purée in a blender and then pass through a sieve to catch any grain that stayed whole.
- "Slat"A printer's transposition for salt. Season lightly at the start and again after sieving, since a stock reduced for two hours concentrates considerably.
- Parboil and strainA few minutes at a rolling boil in plain water, then drain. The recipe does not say how long, nor why the first water is thrown away.
- Liquid to riceA quart of stock to half a pound of rice will not survive two hours of boiling; the rice absorbs roughly three times its weight and the rest evaporates. Keep a further pint or two of hot stock at hand and top up so the mixture stays loose enough to pour.
- Two hoursLong by modern standards, but the point is total disintegration, not tender grains. Cook covered over the lowest heat and stir often, as rice starch scorches on the base of the pan and the burnt taste carries straight through the purée.
- Rice typeUse a short or medium grain. Long-grain and parboiled rices hold their shape better and resist the breakdown this method depends on.
- FinishingAs written the result is a thick unenriched puree. It can be thinned to coating consistency with more stock and enriched with cream or a little butter off the heat, without boiling again; the recipe itself calls for neither.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished soup, four servings as a first course, or a thickening base for a larger pot of vegetable or poultry soup.
This is a method, not a dish: rice used as a thickener. Before cornflour and commercial roux were kitchen staples, purée-based soups relied on a starchy body worked through a sieve, and rice, potato, bread or dried peas each served the purpose. The tamis gives the age away — passer au tamis is simply the instruction to pass something through one, and the sieving is what produced the smooth, velvety texture that distinguished a restaurant purée from a domestic one. Rice reached that texture cheaply, and versions of this base are often associated with names like crème de riz and, when built out with chicken and almonds, with the family of soups labelled à la reine.