Home › Tarts, Puffs and Patties › Rice Patty Pans
Rice Patty Pans
3 ounces ground rice 1½ pints new milk 3 ounces butter 4 ounces sugar 6 eggs (well beaten) Pinch of salt Flavor with nutmeg or lemon peel Boil for 15 minutes the ground rice in the milk. When taken from the fire, stir in the butter and sugar. Add the wellbeaten eggs, the salt and flavoring. When the mixture is nearly cold, line some patty-pans with thin puff paste made with Five Roses flour, and fill 3 quarters full. Strew the tops thickly with currants (cleaned) and dried, and bake for 15 minutes or till done.
A baked rice custard in puff pastry shells, from a Canadian flour-company book that assumes you already know how hot your oven runs. Two things need supplying: a temperature and a pan size.
- Ground riceRice ground to a meal, not rice grains and not the coarse rice cereal sold for babies. It is close to rice flour, though traditionally a little coarser; modern fine rice flour will serve.
- New milkFresh whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed. Use whole milk; anything lower in fat gives a thin, weepy custard.
- Imperial measuresThis is a Canadian book, so the pint is 20 fluid ounces: 1½ pints is 30 fl oz, about 3¾ US cups. The ounces of rice, butter and sugar are weights, roughly 85 g rice, 85 g butter, 115 g sugar.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins, commonly around two to three inches across. A standard 12-cup muffin tin is deeper but workable; this quantity of filling will run to roughly two dozen small shells, so expect more than one batch.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as none could be. For puff paste you want it hot at the start; a modern equivalent would be about 425F for the first 10 minutes to lift the pastry, then dropping to about 375F to set the custard without curdling. This is a suggestion, not the book's instruction, and 15 minutes total is likely to be short unless the shells are genuinely shallow.
- Let the rice coolThe instruction to add the eggs off the heat, and to fill the shells when the mixture is nearly cold, is the hinge. Hot rice scrambles the eggs, and a warm filling soaks into raw puff paste before it can rise.
- Three quarters fullThe custard puffs as it bakes and subsides as it cools. Overfilling gives you filling welded to the tin rather than tarts you can lift out.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. "Cleaned" meant picking out stalks and grit, largely unnecessary now; a rinse and thorough drying is enough, since wet fruit steams and sinks.
Patties in this sense are pastry cases, not ground meat, and small filled shells recur in Edwardian cookbooks because a tin of tartlets stretched a little pastry and a little custard across a tea table. Rice as a thickener for baked custards was long established in British cookery, where ground rice gave a firmer, slightly grainy set that held up to being carried and eaten out of hand. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as an advertisement for its flour, which is why the puff paste is specified by brand while the oven is not specified at all: the book was written for cooks working over wood and coal ranges who judged heat by hand and habit.