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Joyful Pudding
1/3 cup rice 1/2 cup milk 1 cup sugar 1 cup thick cream 1 tablespoon gelatine 1 tablespoon cold water 1 teaspoon vanilla Clean the rice and cook it in a little water for five minutes; drain thoroughly; then cook with the milk for one hour, using a double boiler. Set the pan in cold water; add the sugar and the gelatine which has been previously soaked in the cold water. When thoroughly cold add the cream, whipped, and the vanilla.
A cold moulded rice cream in the riz à l'impératrice family. Note that the printed ingredient list on this leaf is incomplete — rice, milk and sugar appear in the method but not in the column — so read the whole method before shopping.
- Missing quantitiesThe recipe calls for rice, milk and sugar in the instructions without stating amounts. Any figures would be guesswork on our part; comparable period rice creams run roughly half a cup of rice to a quart of milk with half a cup of sugar, but this leaf does not say so.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or whipping cream, about 36 percent butterfat. The term generally meant simply the richest cream on hand, which could be thicker than today's carton; modern heavy cream whipped to soft peaks is the right substitute.
- Gelatine measureA tablespoon of granulated gelatine is about 9 g, a little more than one of today's quarter-ounce (7 g) envelopes. One tablespoon of cold water is not enough liquid to bloom it properly; use about a quarter cup of cold water and let it stand five minutes.
- The hingeThe gelatine must go into the rice while it is still hot enough to dissolve completely, and the whipped cream must go in only when the mixture is cold but not yet set. Fold cream into a warm base and it liquefies; wait too long and the gelatine seizes into strings you cannot smooth out.
- Double boiler timingThe full hour over simmering water is not padding. It cooks the grain to the point where it disappears into the cream, and it prevents the scorching that direct heat gives a milk-and-rice mixture.
- Chilling and unmouldingThe leaf gives no setting time or vessel. If you want it moulded, turn it into a rinsed mould, or simply use a bowl; refrigerate at least four hours, preferably overnight. To unmould, dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- YieldWith no quantities given, yield can only be estimated: made up to a quart of milk it would serve six to eight. It is rich, and small portions suit it.
Rice cooked soft in milk, sweetened, set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream is the domestic descendant of the French restaurant dessert riz à l'impératrice, which adds candied fruit and kirsch and is generally traced to the mid-nineteenth-century Paris kitchens. What made the household version possible was granulated gelatine sold in packets, which from the 1890s onward replaced the older labour of boiling down calves' feet or isinglass and put cold moulded puddings within reach of any cook with an icebox. The name "Joyful Pudding" belongs to the same cheerful, non-descriptive naming habit that gave American cookbooks Snow Pudding, and it appears here in a loose-leaf book, where housewives could add and reorder pages as they collected recipes.