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RICE PUDDING (French method)
Boil the rice in a quart of new milk till it becomes of the consistency of cream and quite soft, taking care not to stir it from the time it is put on the fire till it thickens. Let it stand to cool until about half an hour before serving. Then beat up the yolks of four eggs, add them to the rice, with a little lemon-peel pared very thin, and sweeten with sugar to taste. Set the pudding-dish upon a hot hearth, and brown the top of the pudding with a salamander. This being done, cover the browned top with a thick layer of clarified butter and pounded white sugar. Hold the salamander over it again until the butter and sugar are quite brown and candied. This pudding does not require to be baked--it must be put on the hot hearth and prepared, as directed, in the same dish as it is sent to table in. Some add to the ingredients a little nutmeg or mace, but this is a matter of taste.
An unbaked rice pudding finished like a crème brûlée. Cassell's assumes a hearth, a salamander iron and a cook who knows how much rice goes into a quart of milk.
- The missing quantityNo weight of rice is given. For an imperial quart of milk (about 1.1 litres), something in the region of 5-6 oz (150-170 g) of short-grain pudding rice should give the creamy consistency described; much more and it will set firm on cooling.
- New milk"New milk" is fresh whole milk straight from the dairy, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Ordinary whole milk is the right substitute; skimmed milk will not give the cream-like body the recipe asks for.
- Do not stirThis is the hinge. Stirring while the rice cooks abrades the grains and turns the pudding gluey rather than creamy, so cook it in a heavy pan over the lowest possible heat, or in a bain-marie, and leave it alone until it thickens. Reckon on 45 minutes to an hour.
- The salamanderA salamander was a thick iron disc on a handle, heated in the fire and held over food to brown it from above. A kitchen blowtorch is the closest modern equivalent; an overhead grill at its highest setting works if the dish can take the heat.
- Hot hearthThe dish sits on stone or brick that has been heated by the fire, keeping the pudding hot from below while the top is browned. A very low oven, around 250F/120C, or a warming drawer serves the same purpose.
- The candied topClarified butter with pounded white sugar over it is a brûlée crust with butter in it. Use caster sugar in an even layer, and expect the butter to spit as the sugar caramelises.
- Raw yolksFour yolks are stirred into rice that has been deliberately cooled, and only the surface is heated afterwards. The custard is never brought to a temperature that would pasteurise it, so use pasteurised yolks, or hold the rice hot enough that the mixture reaches 160F/71C throughout.
- Lemon peel and spicePare the zest in wide strips with no white pith and remove it before serving, or grate it finely if you would rather leave it in. Nutmeg or mace, as the book says, is optional.
- YieldA quart of milk with rice and yolks fills a dish for six.
English cookery books of the nineteenth century treated rice pudding as a baked nursery dish: rice, milk, sugar and egg put in the oven until a brown skin formed. The "French method" here is riz au lait enriched into a custard and finished at the last moment with a caramelised crust, a technique borrowed from the same family of dishes as crème brûlée, which appears in French and English books well before Cassell's. The difference the title marks is really one of equipment and timing: the French version is assembled and glazed in the serving dish minutes before it goes to table, rather than left to the oven. The salamander it depends on was standard kitchen furniture in a house with an open range, and Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, could still assume one hung by the fire.