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Frozen Rice Custard
Same as the preceding. Wash 6 ounces of rice in several waters and cook it in the milk. May be flavored with stick cinnamon. If made with rice previously cooked pass it through a colander.
A variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes the frozen custard formula printed immediately before it, and only tells you what to change. Read it as an amendment to that base.
- What "same as the preceding" meansYou need the preceding frozen custard recipe for the proportions of milk, sugar and yolks. Without it this page gives no quantities beyond the rice, so work from a standard cooked custard base and treat the rice as an addition.
- 6 ounces of riceWeight, not volume — roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of raw rice. The recipe does not specify a variety; a starchier round or medium grain will give more creamy body than a long-grain basmati, which tends to stay separate.
- "Cook it in the milk"The rice is simmered in the custard's milk before the eggs go in, so the starch it releases becomes part of the base. Low heat and frequent stirring; milk with rice in it scorches on the bottom quickly.
- Washing in several watersLikely both to remove dust and mill debris from period rice and to rinse off loose starch. With modern packaged rice one rinse is enough, and if you want maximum creaminess you can skip it.
- Custard temperatureWhen the yolks go in, hold the mixture at 170-180F until it coats a spoon. Above about 185F it curdles, and the rice makes it harder to see the moment it thickens.
- Stick cinnamonInfuse a whole stick in the hot milk and fish it out before freezing. Ground cinnamon will not substitute cleanly here — it turns the frozen custard gritty and muddy-coloured.
- The colander instructionLeftover cooked rice is pressed through a colander or sieve so it disperses as a purée rather than as distinct grains. Easiest while the rice is warm and soft; cold rice has firmed up and is much harder to push through.
- FreezingChill the base thoroughly, then churn in an ice cream maker. Rice-thickened bases freeze hard, so let the finished ice sit at room temperature a few minutes before serving. The recipe gives no quantities for the base, so yield depends entirely on the preceding entry.
Frozen rice preparations sit at the point where the rice pudding of the nursery meets the confectioner's ice cream. Nineteenth-century pastry work used rice, arrowroot and other starches to give frozen desserts body and resistance to melting long before commercial stabilizers and gums were available, and a rice-thickened custard would also stretch an expensive egg-and-cream base. The best-known relative is the French riz a l'imperatrice, a moulded cold rice cream usually associated with mid-nineteenth-century Paris kitchens, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The clipped style here — "same as the preceding" — is typical of books written for cooks who already knew the base formula, where a variation needed only its point of difference spelled out.