Apples and Rice
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons. -8 good-sized apples, 3 oz. of butter, the rind of 1/2 lemon grated, 6 oz. of rice, 1½ pint of milk, sugar to taste, 1/2 teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, some apricot jam. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Peel the apples, halve them, and take out the cores; put them into a stewpan with the butter, strew sufficient sifted sugar over to sweeten them nicely, and add the grated lemon-peel. Stew the apples very gently until tender, taking care they do not break. Boil the rice, with the milk, sugar, and nutmeg, until soft, and, when thoroughly done, dish it, piled high in the centre; arrange the apples on it, warm a little apricot jam, pour it over the whole, and serve hot.
TIME. About 30 minutes to stew the apples very gently; about hour to cook the SEASONABLE from August to March. rice.
APPLES AND RICE.
Apples and Rice, A pretty Dish of. INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-6 oz. of rice, 1 quart of milk, the rind of 1/2 lemon, sugar to taste, 1/2 saltspoonful of salt, 8 apples, lb. of sugar, pint of water, 1/2 pint of boiled custard. AVERAGE Cost, 1s. 6d.
Flavour the milk with lemon-rind, by boiling them together for a few minutes; then take out the peel, and put in the rice, with sufficient sugar to sweeten it nicely, and boil gently until the rice is quite soft; then let it cool. In the meantime pare, quarter, and core the apples, and boil them until tender in water, sweetened according to the kind of the fruit; and, when soft, lift them out on a sieve to drain. Put a middling-sized gallipot in the centre of a dish; lay the rice all round till the top of the gallipot is reached; smooth the rice with the back of a spoon, and stick the apples into it in rows, one row sloping to the right, and the next to the left. Set it in the oven to colour the apples; then, when required for table, remove the gallipot, garnish the rice with preserved fruits, and pour in the middle sufficient custard, made by the recipe for BOILED CUSTARD, to be level with the top of the rice, and serve hot.
TIME.-From 20 to 30 minutes to stew the apples; 3/4 hour to simmer the rice; 1/4 hour to bake.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
Two versions of the same idea: sweetened rice cooked in milk, mounded up, with stewed apple halves or quarters set into it. Both are easy, but the shaping is where they succeed or fail.
- The rice6 oz is a scant cup of short-grain pudding rice; the quart of milk in the second version swells it enough to hold a shape. Long-grain is less likely to bind, and the mound may not hold.
- Keep the apples wholeKeep the halves intact -- The instruction not to let them break is the hinge of the first version. Use a firm cooking apple that keeps its shape rather than a Bramley type, stew very gently in the butter and sugar as directed, and lift them out with a slotted spoon.
- The gallipotA gallipot was a small straight-sided glazed earthenware jar. Any ovenproof straight-sided container of about 2 to 3 inches diameter works: it holds the centre open while the rice sets around it, and is lifted out before the custard goes in.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. The stated purpose is to colour the apples, though the recipe's time list also allows a spell in the oven to bake. A hot oven for a short time, or a few minutes under the grill, will colour them; prolonged baking dries the rice.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful of salt is about an eighth of a teaspoon. Small, but the milk and rice are flat without it.
- Cooling mattersThe second version tells you to let the rice cool before shaping. Hot rice slumps; cooled to warm it holds a moulded wall against the gallipot.
- Apricot glazeWarm the jam and pass it through a sieve before pouring, or the fibres and skin sit on the surface. Loosen with a spoonful of water if it is too stiff to coat.
- CustardThe boiled custard called for is a stirred egg custard, cooked over gentle heat until it coats a spoon and never allowed to boil. Half an imperial pint is about ten fluid ounces, enough to fill the well only.
- YieldAs stated, each version serves six as a substantial pudding.
Rice boiled in sweetened milk was one of the cheapest respectable puddings in a Victorian household, and Mrs Beeton's book returns to it repeatedly, often as here dressed up with fruit to make it fit for a dinner table rather than a nursery. The staging described in the second recipe, with a pot used as a temporary mould, apples set in alternating rows and preserved fruits round the edge, belongs to a period when a dish was expected to be built and presented as much as cooked. The seasonable note of August to March reflects the English apple year before cold storage and imports, running from the earliest cooking varieties through to the last of the winter keepers.