Joseph Santley
RICE SNOW BALLS
Cook one cup rice in large quantity of water, and let boil rapidly in uncovered saucepan until tender; say about 30 minutes. Then strain and let drain for twenty minutes. When cold add one pint whipped cream, sweeten and add one teaspoon vanilla. Serve very cold in tall glasses.
I always have two helpings of dessert.
Very truly yours, Josefch Santtay Bangs
A cold rice-and-cream dessert of the sort that turns up constantly in early twentieth-century celebrity cookbooks: three ingredients, no quantities where they would help most, and no yield. Two things decide whether it works — how dry the rice is, and how cold everything is when the cream goes in.
- Drain and chill hardThe hinge is moisture. Warm or damp rice will thin the whipped cream into soup within minutes. Twenty minutes of draining is a minimum; spread the rice on a tray and refrigerate it until thoroughly cold before folding anything into it.
- The rice itselfThirty minutes of rapid open boiling reflects an older way of cooking rice. Modern long-grain is generally tender in 15 to 18 minutes and may collapse if boiled the full half hour -- cook it in plenty of water like pasta and test it.
- A pint of creamMeasure the pint (2 cups) as liquid cream, then whip it; it will roughly double. Use heavy or whipping cream, not anything labelled light, or it will not hold.
- Sweeten how muchNo amount is given. About 1/4 cup of sugar, sifted into the cream as it thickens, suits one cup of raw rice; taste before folding, since chilled desserts read as less sweet than warm ones.
- Folding, not stirringAdd the rice to the cream in two or three additions and fold with a spatula. Beating the two together knocks the air out and you lose the "snow" entirely.
- Yield and servingOne cup of raw rice plus a pint of cream should fill roughly six tall glasses. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep it refrigerated; it does not hold overnight.
- Optional but traditionalOptional -- A spoonful of crushed fruit, jam or preserved cherries at the bottom of each glass is a common finish for desserts of this kind and adds the acidity the recipe otherwise lacks.
Joseph Santley (1889-1971) was a child performer who became a Broadway song-and-dance man and later a Hollywood director; his contribution here belongs to a genre of the 1910s and 1920s in which dishes were gathered from stage names into charity and promotional cookbooks -- hence the chatty sign-off and the mangled printer's rendering of his signature. The dish itself is a descendant of the boiled-rice-and-cream desserts of Victorian kitchens, where rice snowballs were often cooked in cloths or small moulds and turned out in white domes; here the mould has given way to the tall glass the recipe calls for. Rice as a sweet was still ordinary household economy: cheap, filling, and a way to stretch a pint of cream into several servings.