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Chocolate Rice Meringue
2 cups milk 1/4 cup rice 1/3 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter 1/3 cup sugar 1 square melted chocolate 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 cup seeded raisins Whites two eggs 1/2 cup heavy cream Scald milk, add rice and salt, and cook until rice is soft. Add butter, sugar, chocolate, vanilla, and raisins. Cut and fold in the whites of eggs, beaten until stiff, and cream, beaten until stiff. Pour into a buttered baking-dish, and bake fifteen minutes. Cover with a meringue made of the whites of three eggs, six tablespoons powdered sugar, and one-half teaspoon vanilla; then brown in a moderate oven.
A milk-rice pudding enriched with chocolate and lightened with beaten whites and whipped cream, then finished under a meringue. The rice is fully cooked before it ever meets the oven, so the baking is only for setting and browning.
- Cook the rice properly firstTwo cups milk to a quarter cup of raw rice is a generous ratio, and it takes 40-50 minutes over low heat, or in a double boiler, for the grains to go truly soft. Undercooked rice will not soften later in the oven, and the pudding will be gritty.
- A square of chocolateOne square means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard wrapped square of the period. Melt it over hot water and stir it into the hot rice so it disperses; added to a cooled mixture it seizes into specks.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given for the first bake. Use 350F for the fifteen minutes, and the same moderate 350F to brown the meringue, which takes roughly 12-15 minutes to colour and firm.
- Fold, do not stirThe whipped cream and stiff whites are the only lift the pudding has. Let the rice mixture cool to lukewarm before folding, or the whites collapse and you get a dense, wet layer at the bottom of the dish.
- Egg countThe pudding uses two whites, the meringue three, so five whites in all and five yolks left over. Custard, hollandaise or an enriched shortbread will absorb them.
- Meringue techniqueSix tablespoons of powdered sugar to three whites is a soft meringue, not a dry one. Beat the whites to soft peaks first, then add the sugar a spoonful at a time, and spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round, which stops it shrinking and weeping.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart buttered baking dish suits the quantity. It serves four to six, and is best eaten warm the day it is made; the meringue softens overnight.
Rice puddings baked in milk were among the cheapest sweet dishes a nineteenth-century kitchen could produce, and cookery-school books of the period often dressed them up for company. This version combines several such enrichments: chocolate, then commonly sold in one-ounce unsweetened squares and used as a flavouring rather than a confection; whipped cream and beaten whites folded in to lighten the grain-heavy base; and a meringue cap, which allowed the dish to be sent to the table whole. Meringue lids appear frequently in books of this kind, written for households cooking without a professional pastry cook: they used up whites, cost little, and gave a plain dish a finished look.