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Rice, Portuguese, Sweet
Wash and drain a quarter of a pound of rice, and boil it in a pint and a quarter of new milk until it is thoroughly tender but dry and whole. When it is three-parts cooked, add a little more milk, if necessary, or in its place substitute a little cream; add also four ounces of powdered loaf sugar. Stir frequently whilst it is boiling, and especially when it begins to thicken, to keep it from burning. Blanch two ounces of sweet almonds and two or three bitter ones, put them in a moderate oven till they are browned through, and pound them to powder. Place the rice on a shallow dish, sprinkle a tea-spoonful of almond-powder, or a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, over the top, and serve the preparation cold; it will keep good for two or three days. This dish may be varied as follows. When the rice is tender, take it from the fire, and let it cool four or five minutes, then stir in with it three beaten eggs and four table-spoonfuls of thick cream. Stir over the fire till it is on the point of boiling, then pour it out, and let it stand till cold. Put it in a glass dish, and sift almond-powder or cinnamon over it as before. Time to boil the rice, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 8d. or 1s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The rice and milk here are unremarkable; the problem is the flavouring. Two or three bitter almonds toasted and pounded to powder is a nineteenth-century seasoning that has no place in a modern kitchen.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding and stirring into warm milk accomplishes. Unprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are restricted elsewhere for this reason.
- Roasting does not make them safeDry heat in a moderate oven may reduce how much cyanide is liberated, but it cannot be relied on to remove the hazard. The dose in two or three kernels is not usually lethal to an adult, but it is well outside what anyone would knowingly serve, and children are far more vulnerable.
- The eggs in the variationThe second version stirs three beaten eggs into hot rice, takes it "to the point of boiling," then serves it cold and keeps it two or three days. The cooking step itself is hot enough, but an egg-enriched pudding kept for two or three days without refrigeration is a food-safety risk by current standards.
- What the old vocabulary means"New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, and "loaf sugar" is refined cane sugar broken from a cone and crushed — caster or granulated sugar is its descendant. "Powdered" in this book means ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar.
- If you want the dishA sweet almond and cinnamon rice pudding is a perfectly good thing to eat. Use a current recipe with a measured custard temperature and no bitter almonds.
Sweetened rice thickened with milk and scented with almond and cinnamon is one of the oldest continuous dessert traditions in southern Europe, and Portugal's arroz doce — usually finished with egg yolks and dusted in patterns of cinnamon — is its best-known survivor. Cassell's, compiling for late-Victorian British households, collected such dishes under national labels while adapting them to English pantries: loaf sugar, new milk, a shallow dish, and a costing in pence. The bitter almonds are the period's fingerprint. Before commercial almond essence became cheap and standardised, a few bitter kernels were the ordinary way to get that concentrated marzipan note into a pudding, and Victorian cookery books call for them freely in blancmanges, ratafias and custards. That the practice looks alarming now is a measure of how much better the chemistry is understood, not of any change in the almonds themselves.