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RICE GRATIN (M. Ude's recipe)
Take two ounces of rice, which wash and pick, etc. Then let it swell in hot milk--as cream, when used for entremets of this sort, would turn to butter. When the rice is well done, pound half a dozen sweet almonds and the same quantity of bitter ones; when you have made them into a paste, rub them through a tamis, and mix them with the rice, a little sugar, and a very little salt. Then put the rice into a silver pan or porringer, or silver casserole, and leave it on a slow fire for three-quarters of an hour or more. Instead of using the lid, only cover the pan with a sheet of paper, to keep out the dust and the smoke. Serve hot. If you put a cover to it, the steam will prevent its being gratined. Glaze it with pounded sugar by means of the salamander. If it is properly gratined it is a very good dish for family use. RICE, GROUND. (See GROUND RICE, various recipes, also RICE-FLOUR.)
A rice entremets from Ude by way of Cassell's, written for a coal range and a household that kept bitter almonds in the store cupboard. The almonds are the reason this one stays on the page rather than going into a pan.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the nut's own enzyme converts to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste and mixing into warm rice does. Half a dozen is a real dose for one small dish of pudding, and the recipe never brings the mixture to a heat or duration that would reliably drive the cyanide off. Raw bitter almonds are not legally sold as food in the United States and are restricted elsewhere for this reason.
- Not a flavour substitution problemThe modern equivalent of the flavour is a few drops of bottled almond or bitter-almond extract, which is benzaldehyde without the glycoside. But the rest of the method — three-quarters of an hour uncovered over direct heat, glazed under a salamander — assumes equipment and attention that no longer exist in most kitchens. Use a current rice pudding or riz au gratin recipe instead.
- What "gratin" means hereNot a cheese-topped bake. Ude wants the surface of the rice dried and caramelised, which is why he forbids a lid: a cover traps steam, the top stays wet, and no crust forms. The sheet of paper keeps soot out of an open coal fire while letting moisture escape.
- SalamanderA flat iron plate on a long handle, heated in the fire and held over the dish to brown sugar from above. A broiler or a blowtorch is the descendant of it.
- Silver pan or porringerSilver conducts evenly and does not react with milk or sugar, which may be why it is named; Ude gives no reason. A porringer is a small handled bowl. Any heavy-based pan answers the same purpose.
- Milk, not creamUde's aside is that cream used this way would turn to butter; cream held long over heat does break, with the fat separating, though the recipe calls for no stirring. Milk is the safer medium for this method.
- ScaleTwo ounces of dry rice is about a third of a cup — one or two small servings. Nineteenth-century entremets were served in quantity alongside other sweets, not as a single dessert course.
Louis Eustache Ude was among the best-known cooks in Regency and early Victorian London: formerly in French service, then chef to the Duke of York, later to Crockford's club in St James's, and author of The French Cook (first published 1813), which ran through many editions and was still being quarried by compilers decades later. Cassell's, assembling its dictionary in the 1870s, lifted recipes like this one from such authorities and printed them under the original name, in the chef's voice, digressing about why cream misbehaves, rather than the anonymous house style of the rest of the book. The dish itself belongs to the entremets, the sweet or light course set out between the main services of a formal French dinner. Bitter almonds appear throughout period confectionery as the standard source of almond flavour, generally used a few at a time among sweet ones; their danger was understood in outline long before amygdalin was isolated, and the caution that reached print seems more often to have concerned quantity than avoidance.