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Rice, with Pears
Wash six ounces of rice, and put it into a saucepan with a quart of milk, the thin rind of a lemon, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and a piece of butter the size of a small nut. Stir the rice till it boils, then draw it from the fire, and let it simmer gently until it is quite tender and has absorbed the milk. Take it from the fire, and beat it well for three or four minutes, press it into a damp mould, and set it in a cool place to stiffen. Peel and halve a dozen or more ripe pears. Put these into a saucepan with the strained juice of two lemons, a small cupful of water, and half a pound of sugar. Let them simmer till they are tender without being broken. Lift them out gently, and lay them on a dish to cool. Boil the syrup until thick, and, if liked, dissolve in it one or two table-spoonfuls of apricot marmalade. When the rice is to be served, turn it out of the mould, lay the baked pears round it, pour the syrup over, and garnish the rice prettily with angelica, or with strips of lemon-rind laid over it, or with slices of lemon laid upon it. Many cooks stir into the rice after it has boiled four well-beaten eggs and a slice of butter, and beat it over the fire till it is thick, but it will be excellent without these if only the rice is simmered till it is dry, and afterwards beaten till it is smooth. Time, two hours. Probable cost, 1s. 6d., exclusive of the apricot marmalade. Sufficient for five or six persons. RICE, WITH STEWED FRUIT (to have the same effect as cream). Put a breakfast-cupful of rice into a quart of new milk, boil gently for half an hour, stirring occasionally that it may not burn, and stand it aside to get cold. Serve with any kind of stewed fruit, and it will have as good an effect as cream, and will be much more likely to agree with most people. Probable cost, 6d., without the fruit.
A moulded rice pudding served cold with poached pears — essentially a Victorian riz à l'impératrice without the cream. The whole thing hangs on cooking the rice until it is genuinely dry, because that is what lets it hold a mould.
- The hinge: cook the rice dryThe rice must absorb effectively all the quart of milk and then be beaten smooth, or it will slump the moment it is turned out. If it still looks loose after simmering, keep it over low heat and stir rather than adding time in the mould.
- Rice to useUse a short or medium round grain — pudding rice, arborio or Spanish paella rice. Long-grain and basmati release less starch and bind poorly, and parboiled rice is a poor choice for a moulded pudding.
- Butter "the size of a small nut"About 1/2 oz (15 g), roughly a tablespoon. The "slice of butter" in the egg-enriched variant is unspecified, but is presumably somewhat more — perhaps an ounce.
- Quantities in modern terms6 oz rice is about 170 g (a scant cup); the quart here is the imperial quart, about 1.14 litres, noticeably larger than the US quart of 950 ml. A "breakfast-cupful" in the second recipe is somewhere around 8-10 fl oz of dry rice.
- Lemon rindPare the rind thinly with no white pith, and fish it out before beating the rice, or you will get bitter threads through the pudding.
- The pearsFirm, barely ripe pears hold up best; anything soft will collapse in the syrup. Half a pound of sugar to a small cup of water and two lemons' juice is a stiff syrup, so poach at a bare simmer and turn the halves rather than stirring them. A dozen pears is generous for five or six people — eight is ample.
- "Baked pears"The serving instruction says baked, but the pears are poached; the book is inconsistent. Follow the method, not the note.
- The egg versionFour beaten eggs stirred into the hot rice and cooked until thick makes a firmer, custardy mould that unmoulds more reliably. Keep the heat low and stir constantly so the eggs thicken rather than scramble.
- Apricot marmalade and angelica"Marmalade" here means apricot jam; sieve it before dissolving into the reduced syrup to get a clear glaze. Candied angelica is now a specialist item — thin strips of candied lemon peel do the same job.
- Timing and unmouldingTwo hours covers the cooking; allow at least three or four hours chilled for the mould to set firm. Dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a cold dish.
Moulded rice puddings dressed with poached fruit sat between plain nursery rice pudding and the grand cream-and-gelatine entremets of the professional kitchen. Cassell's presents this one as the economical version: the note that many cooks add eggs and butter, and the insistence that it will be "excellent without these," points the recipe squarely at a household budget. The short second entry is franker still, recommending cold milky rice as a substitute for cream on the grounds that it is cheaper and "much more likely to agree with most people," a nod to the period's preoccupation with digestibility, when rich dairy was widely blamed for biliousness. Pears were the natural partner: they store through autumn and winter, and firm cooking varieties that were common in nineteenth-century British gardens were near-inedible raw and intended for exactly this kind of long simmer in sugar syrup.