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Rice Froth
Wash a quarter of a pound of rice, and boil it in a pint of water until the liquor is absorbed. Pour over the rice a quart of milk, and let it boil gently till it is tender. Stir frequently to keep it from burning. Sweeten and flavour with lemon or almond flavouring. If the flavouring is an essence, it should be dropped upon the sugar; if lemon-rind or almonds are used, they should be boiled with the milk. Put the rice and milk when cold into a glass dish. Beat the whites of three eggs to froth, and mix with them a dessert-spoonful of powdered and sifted sugar. Lay this on the rice, and place on the top in table-spoonfuls a quarter of a pound of raspberry jam.
A cold rice pudding with an uncooked meringue cap, assembled in a glass dish so the layers show. The only real technique is patience with the milk stage.
- MeasuresCassell's is a British book, so its pint is 20 fl oz and its quart 40 fl oz: about 2 1/2 cups of water for the first boil and 5 cups of milk for the second. A quarter pound of rice is 4 oz, roughly 2/3 cup. A dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons.
- Which riceUse short-grain pudding rice or Arborio. Long-grain will absorb the milk without breaking down and you lose the creaminess the dish depends on.
- The hingeMilk and starch scorch on the bottom of the pan long before you smell it. Use a heavy saucepan, the lowest possible simmer, and stir down to the base every few minutes; the rice needs 30-45 minutes in the milk to go properly tender.
- Flavouring orderThe instruction about essence versus rind is practical rather than fussy. Volatile alcohol-based essences lose their aroma in hot milk, so they go onto the sugar rather than into the pan; lemon rind and almonds need heat and time to give up their flavour, so they steep with the milk. The recipe does not say so, but rind and whole almonds would have to be lifted out before the pudding is dished.
- Almond flavouringPeriod "almond flavouring" often meant ratafia or bitter-almond essence. Buy a modern almond extract, and if you are steeping whole nuts use ordinary sweet blanched almonds.
- Raw egg whitesThe froth is never cooked. Anyone feeding this to small children, pregnant women, the elderly or the immune-compromised should use pasteurised egg whites, and the dish should be eaten the day it is made.
- AssemblyThe rice must be cold and set before the froth goes on, or the whites collapse into it. Whisk the whites to soft, glossy peaks with the sugar, spread over the surface, and spoon the jam on top in dollops rather than spreading it.
- YieldServes five or six as written. It does not keep: the froth weeps within a few hours.
Rice was one of the cheap, filling starches that Victorian household books leaned on hardest, and Cassell's gives a number of variations on milk-boiled rice, from nursery puddings to moulded creams. "Froth" here is often taken to mean simply a whisked egg-white topping, the same idea as the snow that crowns a syllabub or a trifle, and putting it raw over a cold sweet in a glass dish seems to have raised no concern before refrigeration and before anyone worried about uncooked whites.