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Ground Rice Souffle
Mix 3 ounces of ground rice smoothly with 1/2 pint of new milk or cream. Put them into a saucepan, with 2 ounces of fresh butter, 1/4 of a pound of sugar, a pinch of salt, and the thin rind of 1 lemon, 1/2 inch of cinnamon, or any flavoring that may be preferred. Stir quickly over the fire until the milk boils, pour it into a basin, and when cool add the yolks of 3 eggs, well beaten. Butter a plain mould--and it is well to tie round it a band of white paper, also well buttered, which should be a good deal higher than the mould itself, so that if the batter rises much in the oven, it may not fall over the sides. Whisk the whites of 5 eggs to a firm froth, and add them the last thing. Beat the mixture fully ten minutes after the whites are added. Bake in a quick oven, and serve as soon as the dish is taken from it. Have a hot napkin ready to pin round the dish in which the souffle was baked, and let a heated salamander, or red-hot shovel, be held over it, in its passage from the kitchen to the dining-room. Time to bake, twenty minutes.
A Victorian rice-flour souffle, essentially a thick sweet rice panada lightened with more whites than yolks. Two instructions need rethinking before you start: the ten minutes of beating after the whites go in, and the flavourings left in the pan.
- Ground riceEssentially rice flour, though the historical article was often a slightly coarser meal than today's rice flour; it is not cream of rice cereal. Plain white rice flour from the baking aisle is the nearest equivalent; 3 ounces is roughly 2/3 cup.
- Which pintAn English half pint is 10 fluid ounces, an American one 8. The book gives no clue which is meant. Start at 10 ounces of milk for a batter thick enough to hold the whites, and expect a stiff paste in the pan before the eggs go in.
- Strain out the aromaticsThe lemon rind and cinnamon stick are there to infuse only. Fish them out before the mixture cools, or better, pour the hot base through a sieve into the basin.
- Cool before the yolks"When cool" means barely warm to the finger. Yolks stirred into a near-boiling starch base will scramble in streaks that never disperse.
- Fold, do not beatTen minutes of beating after the whites are added will knock out most of the air the whites were whisked in for. Loosen the heavy base with a spoonful of the whites, then fold the rest in in three additions and stop the moment no white streaks remain.
- Quick ovenRead that as a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F, and do not open the door for the first fifteen minutes. The recipe's twenty minutes suits a mould of modest size; a deeper one will need longer.
- The paper collarButtered baking parchment, tied to stand well above the rim as the recipe directs, does the same job as the band of white paper and releases cleanly. Cut it away just before serving.
- Salamander and napkinThe heated salamander was held over the top to colour it and to slow the collapse on the walk to the table. A minute under a hot grill before it leaves the oven achieves the browning; nothing prevents the sinking, which is why the recipe insists on serving at once.
- YieldServes about four as a pudding. It will not wait, and it does not reheat.
Ground rice puddings were a fixture of nineteenth-century English kitchens, cheap, smooth and thought suitable for invalids, and this recipe reads as one of those puddings lightened into a souffle by the extra whipped whites. Sweet souffles reached British and American cookbooks from French practice over the course of the nineteenth century, and their reputation for temperament is written directly into these instructions: the buttered paper band against overflow, the hot napkin, the salamander held above the dish on the walk from kitchen to dining room. A salamander was a real tool, an iron plate on a long handle heated in the fire and passed over food to glaze or brown it, later displaced by the overhead grill. The lemon rind and short length of cinnamon are conventional sweet-pudding flavourings of the period, and the recipe leaves the door open to whatever else the cook had to hand.