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Seventh Day: Stir
To one gill (or half a tumblerful) of wine, add one and a half tumblerfuls boiling water; flavor with nutmeg or lemon and sweeten slightly. Stir in grated bread or crackers to make it as thick as gruel, and let it boil up once.
No. 86-RICE BLANC MANGE.
Four tablespoonfuls ground rice and one saltspoon salt, wet with cold milk and stirred into one quart boiling milk. Rub the rind of a lemon hard with lump sugar, and sweeten with the sugar thus flavored. Boil, stirring all the time, for eight minutes; then cool it, and add the whites of three eggs beaten to a froth. Place over the fire again and stir constantly until boiling hot, then turn into moulds to harden.
Two separate items are run together here: a wine gruel of the invalid-cookery type, and a moulded ground rice blancmange. Both are simple, but both depend on old measures and on stirring discipline.
- Gill and tumblerA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup — the book's "half a tumblerful" confirms a tumbler of about 8 oz. So the wine gruel is 1/2 cup wine to 1 1/2 cups boiling water, about a pint of liquid before the bread goes in.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. In the blancmange it is seasoning, not optional; without it the pudding tastes flat and chalky.
- Ground rice is rice flourGround rice is a rice flour -- Historically the term covered a somewhat coarser grind than modern rice flour, but rice flour is the closest substitute; avoid the coarse "ground rice" pudding grain sold in some shops, and avoid glutinous sweet rice flour. Four tablespoons to a quart of milk is a soft set — expect something closer to a firm pannacotta than a sliceable pudding.
- Slake it cold firstThe direction to wet the rice flour with cold milk before it meets the boiling quart is the hinge of the recipe. Dry flour tipped into hot milk lumps instantly and no amount of beating will smooth it.
- Rubbing the lemon on sugarRubbing a whole lump of sugar hard against the lemon rind strips the peel oil into the sugar — an oleo-saccharum. Zesting the lemon straight into the sugar and rubbing it with your fingers does the same job in less time. Use about 1/3 cup sugar for a quart of milk.
- Stir without stoppingEight minutes of ground rice in milk over direct heat will catch on the bottom the moment you turn away. Use a heavy pan, moderate heat, and a flat-edged spatula rather than a spoon.
- The egg whitesAdding frothed whites to the cooled base and returning it to the heat is what gives this its lightness. Bring it back up slowly and keep stirring; whites dropped into a hot base or left unstirred will set in threads and the pudding will be grainy.
- MouldsRinse the moulds with cold water and do not dry them — the film of water releases the pudding. Chill at least four hours, and dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn out. A quart of milk fills a 1 1/2-quart mould or six small ones.
- Bread or crackers in the gruel"Grated bread" means stale bread rubbed on a grater into coarse crumbs; unsalted soda crackers crushed fine do the same. Add gradually until it coats the spoon, bring it just to the boil as directed, and serve at once — it thickens and turns pasty as it stands.
Six Little Cooks belongs to a nineteenth-century genre in which cookery was taught to children as a moral as well as a practical accomplishment, and the pairing on this page is characteristic of it: a dish for the sickroom followed by a dish for the table. Wine gruel, wine whey and their relations filled whole chapters of Victorian household manuals under headings like "Cookery for Invalids," where diluted wine thickened with bread was considered nourishing and restorative for anyone recovering from fever before doctors stopped endorsing it. The blancmange is the older and grander of the two. The name is simply French for "white food," and the dish is generally traced to medieval European almond-milk puddings; by the 1870s the almonds had dropped out and the whitening and setting were done with ground rice, cornstarch, arrowroot or isinglass, whichever the pantry held. The recipe here directs that a lemon rind be rubbed against a sugar lump, a method of capturing citrus flavour from the days before bottled extracts were reliable.