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Rock Cream
Take a tea-cupful of good rice and boil it till soft in sweet milk, sweeten with powdered loaf sugar, and pile it up high on a dish. Lay on the rice, here and there, square pieces of currant jelly, or any kind of preserved fruit. Beat up very stiff the whites of four or five eggs, and a little powdered sugar flavoured with orange-flower water or vanilla; add a tea-spoonful of cream, and drop the preparation over the rice, giving it the look of a rock covered with snow.
A Victorian party sweet built on a mound of milk-boiled rice, finished with an uncooked meringue that is never heated at any stage. That last step is the problem.
- The uncooked whitesThe beaten whites, sugar and cream are simply dropped over the rice and served. Nothing in the dish brings the egg to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the assembled dessert then sits at room temperature on the table while it is admired. Use a current recipe if you want this effect.
- Why the rice does not helpThe rice is boiled, though the recipe does not say whether it is still hot when piled; in any case a spoonful of foam dropped on the outside of a mound cools almost immediately and is insulated from whatever heat remains. There is no cooking step for the topping, only decoration.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones, broken and pounded in a mortar. "Powdered loaf sugar" is simply fine white sugar; modern caster or icing sugar corresponds.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for fresh whole milk, distinguishing it from sour or buttermilk, which were separate kitchen staples with their own uses.
- A tea-cupfulAn unstandardised measure, generally taken as somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup. The cook was assumed to own one and to know its size.
- Orange-flower waterA distillate of bitter orange blossom, once a common flavouring alongside vanilla and still sold in Middle Eastern and North African groceries. It is potent, and is easily overdone.
Rock cream belongs to a family of Victorian "snow" and "rock" desserts whose whole point was the look of the thing: a white peak on a glass dish, glinting with red jelly, meant to suggest a snow-covered crag. The rice underneath is the frugal part, a plain nursery pudding dressed up for the table, and the trick of piling it high and speckling it with preserves let a modest household present something ornamental without ices or a confectioner. Cookery books of the period are full of these set pieces, and their readers had ready access to the raw material: eggs from the yard or the dairyman, beaten by hand with a whisk until the arm gave out.