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Rice Cake, with Fruits
Prepare the rice cake of the foregoing receipt; also any kind of rich, thick, stewed down fruit, or compote of lemons or oranges.
Spread the bottoms of two bright pudding pans with butter and press on a coating of bread crumbs; all that will stick. Cover this with the rice cake mixture by spoonfuls, not displacing the crumbs Spread a thin layer of the compote over that, then rice cake, then compote again, and finish with rice on top. Moisten and smooth over with a little cream. Sift on a little fine bread crumbs from a colander. Bake half an hour. The layers should be no thicker than those of ordinary jelly cake. Turn the cake out when done. Serve neat squares or diamonds with the brown bottom side up and the compote syrup, or any sauce around.
We would never trouble about timbales in a book of puddings if the word was not a stumbling block in the way. There are timbales of rice and sweet timbales of macaroni, etc., which in effect are ornamental puddings. The word often appears in bills-of-fare when it means only rice cakes like the preceding kinds. Timbale means kettle drum, and is in allusion to the shape of a pudding in an ornamental pastry case. Suppose you take some yellow nouilles paste and by means of a mould form a shape like the castle in chess, and fill that with rice cake and bake it. That is the simplest form. Petites Timbales de Riz.
A layered rice pudding baked in a crumb-lined tin and turned out to be cut into squares — closer to a French gâteau de riz than to anything a modern reader would call cake. The recipe is a continuation, so read it alongside the rice cake receipt it refers back to.
- It depends on the preceding recipeThe "rice cake" here is the mixture from the receipt immediately before this one in the book. This page gives no proportions of its own, so the two must be read together.
- Pudding pansRound shallow tinned pans, the same shape used for jelly cake layers; the recipe gives no size. Two cake tins work; "bright" simply means clean and unblackened, which mattered when dull or darkened tin absorbed more heat and baked faster.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven for the half hour stated; around 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent, but the figure is a modern gloss, not the book's. The rice mixture is already cooked, so the baking mainly sets the layers and dries the crumb coating.
- Layer thicknessThe instruction to keep layers no thicker than jelly cake layers is the hinge of the recipe. Thick rice layers will not hold a clean cut and the compote will slide when the cake is inverted.
- The fruit"Rich, thick, stewed down fruit" means a preserve reduced until almost no free liquid remains. Modern jams are usually thick enough; loose stewed fruit or canned pie filling will bleed through the rice and prevent it turning out.
- Compote of lemons or orangesIn this period this generally meant the fruit, often sliced, simmered in a heavy syrup until the peel was tender. A thick marmalade is the nearest shortcut.
- Nouilles pasteThe final paragraph's "yellow nouilles paste" is egg noodle dough — flour worked with egg, which accounts for the yellow — pressed into a mould to serve as a case. It is an aside about timbales, not part of the baking instructions above.
- Turning out and servingLet the pans stand a few minutes so the rice firms, then invert; the buttered crumb face becomes the browned top, as the recipe directs. Cut into neat squares or diamonds with the reserved compote syrup spooned around rather than over. No yield is given.
The passage is as much a lesson in menu French as a recipe. Timbale does mean a drum — from Arabic al-tabl by way of Spanish and French — and it is generally said to have been applied to the drum-shaped mould and then to what was baked in it, savoury or sweet. American hotel and restaurant bills of fare were often printed in French whether or not the kitchen was, and the author's impatience with the word reads as the impatience of the kitchen toward menu writers. The dish itself belongs to the long European tradition of sweet rice puddings baked firm enough to slice, of which the French gâteau de riz is a relative. Rice was cheap, milk and eggs were the pastry cook's daily stock, and a mixture that could be layered with any preserve on hand and cut into neat geometric portions was exactly the kind of economical, presentable dessert such a kitchen could make good use of.