Home › Creams, Jellies and Cold Sweets › Rice Cream
Rice Cream
Ingredients.
One pint of Milk.
Three ounces of Loaf Sugar.
Two ounces of ground Rice.
Half an ounce of French Gelatine.
Half a pint of Double Cream.
Boil the milk and sugar together, stir in the ground rice and cook it for about six minutes, then draw it off the fire. Dissolve the gelatine in a gill of milk and stir it to the rice, add the cream whipped, mix all lightly together, pour into a mould decorated according to taste; when set turn it out, and it is ready to serve.
A moulded rice blancmange stiffened with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. The only real difficulty is temperature management when the three elements are combined.
- The hinge: cool the rice base firstThe whipped cream must go into a base that is barely lukewarm — cool enough not to melt the cream, warm enough that the gelatine has not begun to set. Fold cream into a hot base and it collapses to a thin custard; wait too long and you get rubbery lumps through the mixture.
- Ground riceGround rice is rice milled to a coarse flour — the same grain, ground, rather than a different substance. It is coarser than the fine rice flour sold today, though rice flour or cream of rice is the nearest substitute. It thickens rather than swelling like a pudding rice, which is why six minutes of cooking is enough.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar broken from a cone or block. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct substitute; three ounces is about 85 g, or a scant half cup.
- A gill, and an imperial pintA gill is a quarter of a pint — 5 fl oz on the imperial measure. The recipe does not say whether this gill is additional to the pint boiled with the sugar or taken from it; read as extra, the milk comes to 25 fl oz in total.
- French gelatineLeaf gelatine sold under this name and generally well regarded in the period. Half an ounce is about 14 g, roughly 7 standard leaves or two 7 g envelopes of powder — a firm set intended to survive being turned out of a mould onto a plate. Soften leaves in cold water first, then dissolve in the warmed gill of milk rather than cold milk.
- Double creamAround 48% butterfat. American heavy cream at 36% will whip but gives a slightly looser result. Whip to soft peaks only; stiffly whipped cream will not fold in evenly and leaves white streaks in the set cream.
- The mould"Decorated according to taste" is left open; glacé cherries, angelica or preserved fruit set into the mould before pouring would be the usual reading. Rinse the mould with cold water rather than oiling it, chill until firm, and dip briefly in hot water to turn out.
- YieldDepending on whether the gill is extra to the pint, the mixture comes to roughly 1½–2 pints before the air in the whipped cream is counted; six as a cold sweet.
Rice cream sits at the point where the medieval blancmange — almonds, rice and capon breast pounded white — had shed its meat and become simply a white moulded sweet. By the late nineteenth century the essential trick was gelatine, sold in sheets. The whole point of a dish like this is that it stands up on a plate: the gelatine is calculated for structure, not texture, and the whipped cream is what keeps it from eating like glue. Ground rice, cheap and shelf-stable, was the workhorse thickener of Victorian nursery and invalid cookery, and its appearance in the cold-sweets chapter shows how easily the same ingredient moved between the sickroom and the dinner table.