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Fig Chartreuse
Wash ½ pound of figs in warm water and drain. Barely cover with cold water and soak over night. Place in a double boiler and cook very slowly until tender, then pour off the juice.
Wash 1 cupful of rice and drop into a kettle of slightly salted water and boil for ten minutes.
Drain and place in a double boiler, and from time to time add a little milk until very soft and the milk is all absorbed, then stir in 1 tablespoonful of sugar. Have ready a buttered mold. Line bottom and sides with the rice, place the figs in the center and cover with rest of rice.
Measure the fig juice, add water if necessary, to make 1 pint, and ½ cupful of sugar and boil for ten minutes. Bake the chartreuse for fifteen minutes in a slow oven, then turn out. Serve with the fig syrup to which is added a little vanilla.
A moulded rice pudding with a core of stewed dried figs, turned out and served with its own syrup. The whole thing depends on the rice being soft enough to pack yet stiff enough to hold a wall.
- The fig quantity is unreliableThe figure printed for the figs reads as 12 pound, which cannot be right against 1 cupful of rice. It is most likely a misprint or misreading of 1/2 pound (about 225 g), a quantity that suits the amount of rice.
- Slow oven300F. The pudding is already cooked; the fifteen minutes only sets the mould so it will unmould cleanly. Do not let it colour.
- Rice choiceA short or medium grain rice is the safer choice. Long grain releases less starch and is less likely to bind the walls of the mould firmly.
- The milk stageAdding milk a little at a time in the double boiler is the hinge of the recipe. Expect 2 to 2 1/2 cups over 40 to 50 minutes; stop when the grains are broken down and no free liquid remains, or the lining will slump.
- Sugar in the riceOne tablespoonful for a whole mould is barely sweet by modern taste; the syrup carries most of the sweetness. Increase to two if serving without the full quantity of syrup.
- The syrupThe soaking and cooking liquid from the figs, made up to 1 pint with water, plus 1/2 cup sugar, boiled ten minutes. It will still be thin; another five minutes gives it more body. Add the vanilla off the heat.
- UnmouldingButter the mould heavily and let the baked pudding stand five to ten minutes before inverting. A brief dip of the mould in hot water loosens it if it sticks.
- YieldAbout a quart mould, giving roughly six modest portions. Good warm; it also slices cleanly cold the next day.
A chartreuse in classical French cookery is a moulded dish lined with one ingredient and filled with another, then turned out whole; the name is traditionally traced to the Carthusian monks and their meatless cooking, the vegetable-lined version being the original. By the late nineteenth century the form had found its way into English and American household books, where the lining could be rice or macaroni as readily as carrot and turnip, and the filling fruit as readily as game. This sweet version uses dried figs and a cup of rice, stretched with milk and water, to produce a dish with the shape and ceremony of a restaurant sweet. The technique of cooking rice in a double boiler with milk added by degrees, rather than boiling it hard, was standard advice of the period for producing a creamy pudding without scorching on a coal range.