Gateau de Riz
1/4 lb. of rice, INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons. lb. of rice, 1 quart of milk, the rind of 1 lemon, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, sugar to taste, 4 oz. of butter, 6 eggs, bread-crumbs. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Put the milk into a stewpan with the lemon-rind, and let it infuse for 1/2 hour, or until the former is well flavoured; then take out the peel, have ready the rice, washed, picked and drained; put it into the milk, and let it gradually swell over a very slow fire. Stir in the butter, salt and sugar, and, when properly sweetened, add the yolks of the eggs, and then the whites, both of which should be well beaten and added separately to the rice. Butter a mould, strew in some fine bread-crumbs, and let them be spread equally over it; then carefully pour in the rice, and bake the pudding in a slow oven for 1 hour. Turn it out of the mould, and garnish the dish with preserved cherries, or any bright-coloured jelly or jam. This pudding is exceedingly nice flavoured with essence of vanilla.
TIME. to 1 hour for the rice to swell; to be baked 1 hour in a slow oven.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Rice Pudding, Baked or Boiled Ground. INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons.-2 pints of milk, 6 tablespoonfuls of ground rice, sugar to taste, 4 eggs, flavour ing of lemon-rind, nutmeg, bitter-almonds, or bay-leaf. AVERAGE COST, 11d.
Put 1½ pint of the milk into a stewpan with any of the above flavourings, and bring it to the boiling point, and, with the other 1/2 pint of milk, mix the ground rice to a smooth batter; strain the boiling milk to this, and stir over the fire until the mixture is tolerably thick; then pour it into a basin, leave it uncovered, and when nearly or quite cold sweeten it to taste, and add the eggs, which should be pre- ¡viously well beaten, with a little salt. Put the pudding into a well-buttered basin, tie it down with a cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil for 1½ hour. For a baked pudding, proceed in precisely the same manner, only using half the above proportion of ground rice, with the same quantity of all the other ingredients; an hour will bake the pudding in a moderate oven. re- RICE PUDDING.
Stewed fruit, or preserves, or marmalade, may be served with either the boiled or baked pudding, and will be found an improvement. Ground rice pudding can also be made very nice without eggs.
TIME.-1 hour to boil, 1 hour to bake.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A moulded rice pudding, unmoulded and glazed with jam — closer to a rice cake than the nursery pudding. A few of the quantities need reading with care.
- The missing rice weightThe rice quantity has lost its fraction in the printing; it should be read as a fraction of a pound of round-grain pudding rice. Judge by consistency: too little and the moulded pudding will not turn out, too much and it bakes stiff and dry.
- SaltThe salt is half a teaspoonful, as printed. That is the right amount for a quart of milk and a pound of rice.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is roughly 300-325F (150-160C). Give the moulded pudding the full hour; it should be just set through so it will turn out cleanly.
- Swelling the riceThe hinge of the dish. The rice must absorb the milk over the gentlest possible heat — 30 to 60 minutes — until very soft and thick, stirring often. Rushing it scorches the milk at the base and leaves the grains chalky in the centre.
- Eggs, folded not stirredSix eggs to a quart of milk is a rich set. Let the rice cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble, and fold the beaten whites in last with a light hand — they are what keeps the moulded pudding from being leaden.
- The mouldA plain charlotte mould or a pudding basin large enough to take the mixture, well buttered and lined with fine dry crumbs, which act as a release layer and give the turned-out pudding a brown crust. Let it stand five minutes before inverting.
- Vanilla"Essence of vanilla" was often a thin, sweetened flavouring. A teaspoon of good extract, or a split pod infused in the milk with the lemon peel, is the equivalent.
- YieldServes six, as the original says, and it is better slightly warm than hot. Preserved cherries, redcurrant jelly or apricot jam all suit it.
Rice puddings run through nineteenth-century English cookery in every register, from the cheapest boiled nursery dish to this one — gateau de riz, in which rice is cooked down in flavoured milk, enriched with butter and eggs, set in a crumbed mould and turned out to be sauced or glazed at table. The distinction Mrs Beeton draws is largely one of presentation and cost. This version runs to a shilling and sixpence and six eggs; the ground-rice pudding that follows in the book costs elevenpence, and the same entry offers both a boiled version in a cloth-tied basin and a baked one at half the ground rice. Rice itself had become cheap and unremarkable in British kitchens by the 1860s, which is why the same grain could appear as plain economy food in one household and, moulded and named in French, as a dinner-party sweet in another.