Rice Royale
Pick over and wash 1 cupful of rice. Drop into a large kettle of boiling water, add ½ teaspoonful of salt and 1 tablespoonful of sugar and keep at a galloping boil until the grains feel tender when rubbed between the fingers. Drain thoroughly, pack lightly in a slightly buttered mold and let stand ten minutes in the open oven.
Turn out carefully on a deep platter. Baste over this the syrup from canned fruit (heated), arrange the fruit itself around the base and serve either hot or cold.
A frugal molded rice dessert that depends entirely on well-drained, fully tender rice and a good syrup. Almost everything here still works as written; only a few terms need translating.
- Rice to useA plain white rice boiled loose in abundant water suits the method, though the recipe names no variety. Parboiled or converted rice separates too cleanly to hold a mold well, and brown rice needs far longer than the recipe allows.
- "Pick over"Older rice arrived with stones, hulls and chaff, so cooks spread it on a tray and sorted it by hand. Packaged rice today needs only a rinse under cold water to wash off surface starch.
- QuantitiesOne cup of raw rice yields roughly three cups cooked, enough for four to six servings from a 1-quart mold.
- The galloping boilCooking rice pasta-style in a large volume of hard-boiling water is the point: it keeps the grains moving so they cook evenly and stay separate. Expect 12 to 15 minutes, and test by pinching a grain rather than by the clock.
- Drain thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Wet rice will not hold the shape of the mold and will slump on the platter. Drain in a sieve and let it steam dry for a minute or two before packing.
- "The open oven"On a coal or gas range this most likely meant setting the mold in the residual warmth of the oven with the door ajar, simply to dry and set the surface. No temperature is given; the lowest oven setting, or a warm spot on the stovetop, will do the same work.
- Packing and unmoldingPress the rice in lightly, not tightly, or the center compacts into a solid plug. Run a thin knife around the edge before inverting, and turn it out while still warm.
- The syrupCanned fruit today is often packed in juice or light syrup rather than the heavy syrup of the period. Reduce thin syrup by half in a small pan to get a glaze that coats rather than pools, or add a spoonful of sugar as it heats.
Molded rice puddings run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery under a range of grand-sounding names. Royale here appears to signal a dish dressed up for the table rather than any particular technique, though the word carries a more specific sense elsewhere in French cookery. The economy of the trick is plain: rice, salt and a spoonful of sugar are turned into a company dessert by using the syrup from a can of peaches or pears. Canned fruit was cheap and shelf-stable by the early 1900s, and recipes of this kind treat the packing syrup as an ingredient with its own value. The boiled-and-drained method, rather than the slow oven-baked custard style of rice pudding, also saves fuel and uses no eggs or milk.