Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice Solid
Rice Solid
Beat a quarter of a pound of ground rice to a smooth paste with a little milk, and stir into it as much boiling milk--or milk and cream if preferred--as will make the quantity up to a quart. Sweeten the mixture, and flavour with any acceptable flavouring. A table-spoonful of brandy will improve it. Simmer gently, and continue stirring until it leaves the saucepan. When done enough, let it cool a little, and pour it into a glass dish. Before serving lay upon it a pint of cream which has been whipped to foam. (See CREAM, WHIPPED.) Time to boil the rice, half an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the cream, 7d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A ground-rice blancmange, set by starch rather than gelatine and served under whipped cream. The only real skill is in the cooking of the rice paste.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, ground finer than the grain but coarser than cornflour; Asian grocers sell it cheaply, and it is not the same as glutinous rice flour. A quarter of a pound is about 4 oz, roughly 3/4 cup.
- Imperial quartThe book's quart is 40 fl oz, so about 5 US cups of liquid in total, counting the milk used to slake the rice. Use whole milk, or milk with up to a third cream.
- The hinge: slake the flour coldBeat the rice flour to a lump-free paste with cold milk before any hot liquid touches it. Tipping boiling milk onto dry rice flour sets lumps that are hard to whisk out afterwards.
- "Until it leaves the saucepan"The mixture is done when it thickens enough to pull cleanly away from the sides of the pan as you stir. Half an hour of gentle simmering is not an exaggeration -- rice starch needs long cooking to lose its raw, chalky taste, and undercooking is the usual failure here.
- Sweetening and flavourNo quantity is given; 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar suits a quart. Period flavourings would be lemon peel or a vanilla pod infused in the milk, bitter-almond essence, or the tablespoon of brandy suggested.
- Setting itThe recipe has you let it cool a little before pouring into a glass dish; lay a disc of buttered paper or cling film directly on the surface if you dislike a skin. Allow 3 to 4 hours in the refrigerator to set firm.
- The creamAn imperial pint of cream is 20 fl oz, or 2 1/2 cups, whipped to soft foam -- generous by modern taste, and half that quantity is plenty. Whip only to the point where it holds a loose peak; it is meant to be spooned over, not piped.
- YieldFive or six as written, and it is best eaten the day it is made. Rice-starch puddings turn grainy and weep after a second day in the cold.
Ground-rice moulds like this belong to the long English line of blancmanges -- originally almond-and-capon dishes of the medieval kitchen, later reduced to a plain white sweet set with isinglass, gelatine, cornflour or, as here, rice flour. A recipe of this kind is generally associated with Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery (first issued in the 1870s and reprinted in expanded form for decades), which files it under the plainest of desserts, and the costing of sevenpence for five or six people, cream excepted, tells you exactly why: rice flour was among the cheapest thickeners a Victorian household could buy, and it was pressed into service for nursery and invalid puddings as much as for the dinner table. The word "solid" is often said to distinguish it from the whipped and jellied rice creams elsewhere in such books, though that reading is a guess rather than a settled point. The pint of whipped cream and the spoonful of brandy are the concessions that lift a sickroom dish into company.