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Rice Pudding a La Francaise
4 ounces Carolina rice 1 pint of milk 1 ounce of butter 2 ounces sugar 4 drops essence vanilla or 4 ounces of ground almonds Wash the rice thoroughly, and put into a double saucepan with the milk, butter and sugar, and allow it to cook slowly for two hours, stirring occasionally. Turn out, and when cold, add the vanilla or almonds. Grease a pudding dish, and steam the mixture for one hour and a half. Serve with jam or sweet sauce.
A milk-cooked rice pudding in the French manner: the grain is stewed to softness first, flavoured off the heat, then steamed in a mould and turned out. A few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, once the standard American export grade and frequently called for by name in British books. Any long-grain white rice works; short-grain will give a stickier, more porridge-like set, which is not wrong here but changes the texture.
- The pintIf the book is British, a pint is 20 fl oz (2.5 cups) to 4 oz (about 2/3 cup) of rice. An American pint of 16 fl oz will give a drier mixture. Err toward the larger volume; the rice should be soft and loose, not dry, before it goes into the mould.
- Double saucepanA double boiler, or a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water. The point is that milk and rice scorch easily over direct heat; the long slow cooking time follows from the gentle indirect heat.
- Two hours is not a mistakeOver water the mixture never exceeds about 200F, so the grain softens slowly and the starch thickens the milk without catching. Stir every fifteen minutes or so and scrape the bottom.
- Flavour after coolingThe recipe adds the vanilla or almonds to the cooled rice rather than during cooking. Vanilla essence is volatile, which may be part of the reason, though the mixture is steamed for a further hour and a half afterwards.
- Vanilla or almonds, not bothFour drops of essence and four ounces of ground almonds are alternatives, and they make two different puddings. The almond version is far richer and stiffer, closer to a baked almond rice; it may need a splash more milk to stay spoonable before steaming.
- Steaming the mouldGrease the dish well, cover it with greased paper or foil tied down, and set it in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up, lidded, for the hour and a half. Without a cover, condensation drips in and the top goes watery.
French rice puddings of this type — rice stewed soft in sweetened milk, flavoured, then set in a mould and turned out — belong to the same family as the nineteenth-century riz à l'impératrice and its plainer relatives, and à la française on an English or American recipe generally gestures at that lineage. The rice itself carries a longer history: "Carolina" had been shorthand for good long-grain white rice since the Low Country plantations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made it a major export, and the name persisted on packets long after the trade that produced it had collapsed.