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RICE CUSTARD (another way)
Take a quart of milk and about one ounce of ground rice. Boil the milk with the ground rice until it thickens, and sweeten with sugar. Beat up four or six eggs, and add these to the preparation when it has cooled a little; add also an ounce of sweet almonds, pounded. Stir the custard over the fire till it is nearly boiling.
A stirred custard thickened twice over — once with rice flour, once with egg — and it lives or dies on the last line of the method.
- Never let it boil"Nearly boiling" means about 180F/82C, at which point the eggs set and the custard coats a spoon. Take it past that and the eggs curdle into grains suspended in thin milk; the starch gives some protection but not much.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, ground rather coarser than the modern baking sort but interchangeable with it. An ounce to a quart of milk is a light thickening — enough to give body, not enough to make a mould.
- The quartCassell's is British, so this is an imperial quart of 40 fl oz, a shade under 5 US cups. Using 4 US cups gives a slightly richer custard, which is no loss.
- Temper the eggsThe instruction to cool the rice-milk "a little" before adding the beaten eggs is doing real work. Pour a ladleful of the warm milk into the beaten eggs first, whisk, then return the lot to the pan.
- Four eggs or sixFour gives a pouring custard for fruit or a pudding; six gives a noticeably thicker custard once chilled. Victorian eggs were on average smaller than today's large, so err toward the lower count.
- Sweet almondsSimply ordinary almonds — the term distinguishes them from bitter almonds, which older books also called for and which are not sold for eating. Blanch, then pound with a spoonful of the milk to stop them oiling; a food processor does it in seconds.
- SugarNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons per quart suits a custard served with stewed fruit; four if it is to be eaten alone.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1.2 to 1.4 litres, serving six. Strain through a sieve as you pour it out to catch any threads of set egg, and press a disc of paper on the surface if it is to cool.
Ground rice was one of the cheap thickeners of the Victorian larder, sitting alongside arrowroot, sago and cornflour on the grocer's shelf, and it appears constantly in nineteenth-century puddings for the same reason: it stretched eggs and cream, which were expensive, with starch, which was not. Here an ounce of rice flour does part of the thickening and four eggs finish it. The pounded almonds are a much older habit, a survival of the medieval and early modern taste for almond milk and almond-thickened creams that persisted in English sweet cookery long after the almonds themselves had stopped being a thickener and become simply a flavour. The heading "another way" tells us only that at least one earlier version of rice custard precedes it on the page.