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Rice Custards
Put a blade of mace, and a quartered nutmeg into a quart of cream; boil and strain it, and add to it some boiled rice and a little brandy. Sweeten it to taste, stir it till it thickens, and serve it up in cups or in a dish; it may be used either hot or cold.
A custard in name only: there are no eggs here, and the thickening comes from starch in the cooked rice. The whole dish turns on infusing the cream properly and then not letting it catch.
- QuantitiesA quart of cream is 4 cups. The amount of rice is left to you; about 1 cup of soft-cooked short-grain rice to the quart gives a pourable custard, 1½ cups a spoonable one. Sugar in the range of 1/3 to 1/2 cup suits most palates.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, sold today mostly ground. One blade is roughly 1/4 teaspoon ground; if using ground spice, infuse it in the cream anyway and strain through fine muslin rather than a sieve.
- A quartered nutmegA whole nutmeg cracked into quarters, not grated. Quartering exposes the interior to the hot cream while leaving pieces large enough to strain out. Grated nutmeg would make the cream gritty and far more strongly flavoured.
- Boil and strainBring the cream just to a boil with the spices, then draw it off the heat and let it stand 15-20 minutes before straining. A hard rolling boil in cream scorches at the base and the flavour follows the custard all the way to the table.
- Boiled ricePlain rice, boiled and drained; period receipts sometimes boiled it in milk instead. Cook it soft, well past al dente, since it has no long simmer in the cream to finish it.
- Stir till it thickensOver low heat and constantly, with a flat-ended spoon or a heatproof spatula worked into the corners of the pan. Starch and dairy sink and stick, and roughly 8-10 minutes is usually enough. Once it coats the spoon, take it off; longer cooking risks catching and stiffening.
- The brandy"A little" might be about 2 tablespoons for a quart. The recipe adds it with the rice, before thickening; if you would rather not lose the aroma to the steam, add it once the custard has thickened and cooled slightly.
- Serving and yieldAbout 5 cups, so six to eight cups' worth. If serving cold, cover the surface with a disc of parchment or cling film in contact with the custard, or a skin forms; it will also set noticeably firmer in the refrigerator than it looks in the pan.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery used "custard" loosely, for any sweetened cream thickened at the stove, and rice, arrowroot, ground almonds or flour stood in for eggs freely. Mace and nutmeg came from the same tree and were the standard pairing for creams and possets long before vanilla was cheap enough to be domestic; brandy served as flavouring. The instruction that it "may be used either hot or cold" is characteristic of receipts of this kind, which were written to be adaptable to whatever the day's meals required rather than to a fixed course. Rice itself was cheap enough to be a staple of institutional and household puddings, and the dish was far less extravagant than an all-egg custard using a quart of cream.