Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice Pears
Rice Pears
Take a quarter of a pound of rice, and boil it in milk till quite thick, then stir in a piece of butter and a few grains of salt. Remove the rice from the fire, and put it into a dish to cool; add a table-spoonful of almonds chopped fine, with a few bitter almonds amongst them, the grated peel of a lemon, sugar to taste, three or four eggs beaten, and one ounce of grated bread-crumbs. Form this mass into the shape of pears, dip them in egg beaten up, strew thickly with bread-crumbs, and bake.
The problem is not the rice or the shaping but the bitter almonds, which are a genuine toxin rather than a quaint flavouring. The points below explain why this particular formula should be left on the page.
- Bitter almonds are the hinge, and they are poisonousBitter almonds (the kernels of Prunus dulcis var. amara and closely related stone-fruit kernels) contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is chopped, chewed or wetted. Victorian cooks used them deliberately for their intense almond flavour, and instructions to slip "a few" among a quantity of sweet almonds recur in cookery books of the period.
- "A few" is an unmeasured doseThe recipe gives no count and no weight. The margin between a flavouring quantity and a harmful one is narrow, and it is narrower still for children, who are the likeliest eaters of a dish moulded into little pears.
- Baking does not make it safeSome cyanide is driven off by heat, but the loss depends on temperature, moisture and time, none of which this recipe specifies. Nothing here guarantees the kernels are detoxified, and the original gives no oven heat or baking time at all.
- You cannot buy them anywayRaw bitter almonds are not sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in many other countries. Where the flavour survives commercially it is as a processed extract from which the cyanogenic compounds have been removed.
- Not a swap to improviseSubstituting apricot kernels or peach kernels, sometimes recommended in old books as an equivalent, carries the same amygdalin problem and should not be treated as a workaround.
- If you want the dishMoulded sweet-rice croquettes shaped as fruit are still made; use a current recipe with stated quantities, oven temperature and baking time rather than adapting this one.
The recipe treats boiled rice thickened with egg and crumb as a modelling material, shaped here into small pears in imitation of the fruit. Dishes that impersonate other foods were a staple of nineteenth-century table display, and a sweet rice mixture egged, crumbed and browned sits at the cheap, domestic end of that tradition. The bitter almonds are the period signature: slipping a few bitter kernels among the sweet ones was a common route to a pronounced almond note, a practice that appears without comment in English and continental cookery books of the era and fell out of domestic use as bitter-almond sales were restricted and prepared essences became the usual substitute.