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Timbales of Rice, with Fruit
Wash a quarter of a pound of best Carolina rice, drain it on a hair sieve, and put it in a clean saucepan with a pint of cold new milk, a pinch of salt, and three or four large lumps of sugar which have been rubbed upon the rind of a fresh lemon or a Seville orange to extract the flavour. Put the saucepan at the side of the fire that the rice may swell very slowly and gradually; then stir it well, put it on the fire, add a lump of butter the size of a walnut, and let the rice boil gently until it has absorbed all the milk and is so tender that it can be crushed to a smooth paste with the back of a wooden spoon. Unless it is allowed to boil very gently and till it is quite dry it will not answer the purpose. Have ready some small buttered cups, beat the rice well, press it into the cups while it is still warm, and let it remain in them until quite cold. Boil the strained juice of a large fresh lemon with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar to a clear syrup, and slice into this six apples peeled and cored. Let them simmer gently until reduced to pulp, take them off the fire for a minute or two, and stir gradually into them the well-beaten yolks of four eggs. Beat them over the fire for two minutes, then let them cool. Turn the rice out of the moulds. If it is found to be at all difficult to do this, set the cups in hot water for a minute or two, again reverse them on a baking-tin, and with the point of a sharp knife carefully scoop out a hollow in the centre of each. Fill this with the prepared apples, and brush the timbales all over with the white of egg whisked to a froth and mixed with powdered and sifted sugar. Pour upon the fruit as much of this icing as is left, and bake the timbales in a well-heated oven. Serve very hot. Time to bake the timbales, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 3d. each. Sufficient for a small dish.
A Victorian rice-and-apple pudding built as individual moulded shapes, iced with meringue and flashed in a hot oven. The whole thing depends on the rice being cooked genuinely dry, so it holds its shape when turned out.
- The hinge: cook the rice to drynessThe rice must absorb every drop of the milk and be soft enough to crush to paste against the pan. Any free liquid and the timbales slump when unmoulded; the recipe says as much and means it.
- MeasuresA quarter pound of rice is about 115 g, roughly half a cup dry. The pint is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz or about 2.4 US cups. A lump of butter the size of a walnut is roughly 15 g.
- Carolina riceNineteenth-century Carolina rice was a milled American long grain, sold in Britain as the premium grade. A modern short-grain pudding rice will give the starchy, mouldable texture this needs more readily than today's long grain.
- Loaf sugar and the lemon rubLoaf sugar came as a hard cone broken into lumps. Rubbing a lump over citrus zest to draw out the oil is the old oleo-saccharum trick; with granulated sugar, rub the zest into the sugar with your fingers instead. Seville oranges are a winter-only fruit.
- Heat levels"At the side of the fire" indicates very gentle heat, a bare tremble. The recipe says only "well-heated oven" and gives no temperature; a hot oven is implied by the quarter-hour bake and the need to colour the meringue.
- The egg-yolk apple fillingFour yolks stirred into hot apple pulp will scramble if the pan is still at heat. Take it off for a couple of minutes as instructed, stir the yolks in gradually, then return it briefly, stirring constantly, until it thickens.
- The icingWhisked egg white folded with sifted icing sugar is a soft meringue. Beat the white to soft peak before adding sugar, or it will weep in the oven.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of timbales; it says only "sufficient for a small dish" and costs them at 3d. each. Six apples and four yolks point to something like six teacup-sized moulds. Dariole moulds or ramekins work; butter them well and line the bases with a disc of parchment if you want certainty at turning-out.
Timbale is French for a kettledrum, and the word passed to the drum-shaped mould and then to anything set in one — savoury or sweet. Cassell's places this among its rice entries at a moment when rice puddings were a fixture of the English middle-class table. "Carolina" had by then become a grade name as much as an origin, attached to the long-grain rice grown in the American Lowcountry on plantations worked by enslaved people; the Carolina industry declined after the Civil War, and British buyers drew increasingly on Burmese and Indian rice. The construction here — a moulded starch case hollowed and filled, then masked in meringue and browned — belongs to the French repertoire that Victorian cookery writers were busy translating for households without a French chef.