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Vanilla Sauce
2 full quarts of well cooked dry rice. 6 ounces of butter. 8 ounces of sugar. 8 yolks of eggs. 1 quart of milk. 1 tablespoonful of lemon extract. The rice should be already cooked in water and milk. Measure it and while still hot stir in the butter and sugar. Beat the yolks with the milk gradually added; stir well into the rice; flavor slightly; pour the pudding into two buttered pans and bake about half an hour.
To prepare the rice from the first boil 1 pound of well-washed rice in 1 quart of water, add a pinch of salt. When half done add 1 pint of milk and let simmer an hour with the steam shut in. Never stir it and it will not be very apt to burn.
Any of these puddings left over can be used for fritters. Full directions for making a score or more of good pudding sauces will be found all together, further on. For these richest rice compounds a clear transparent sauce flavored with vanilla, or else with red wine, will be found most suitable.
As with the bread custard and the plain rice the reader is advised to note particularly the preceding rice custard, not only to avoid repetition here, which would be a small matter, but because the mystery is all removed from the variations when the basis of all has once been made.
Despite the heading, the text on this page is a baked rice pudding for a large kitchen, with the vanilla sauce only recommended, not given. Treat it as a bulk custard-rice bake and scale down if you are not feeding twenty.
- The hinge: temper the yolksThe rice goes into the mixture hot, and the beaten yolks are thinned with a full quart of milk before they meet it. Add the yolk-milk in a slow stream while stirring so it does not set into threads of cooked egg before the pudding reaches the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. Bake at 350F; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and a thermometer reads 175-180F. Half an hour is realistic only in shallow pans.
- Pan size and yieldTwo quarts of cooked rice plus a quart of milk and the enrichments comes to roughly three and a half quarts, which fills two 9x13-inch pans to something under an inch. That is roughly 18-20 portions, a scale that points to a professional rather than a family kitchen.
- Weights, not cups6 ounces of butter is 1.5 sticks; 8 ounces of sugar is a generous cup. The rice is measured by volume after cooking and by weight before it, so do both: 1 lb dry rice, 1 quart water, then 1 pint milk.
- "Steam shut in"The first cooking wants a tight lid and the lowest possible flame for the hour of simmering, with no stirring. Stirring releases starch and makes the grains mushy, and it is also what makes rice catch on the bottom.
- Lemon extractPeriod lemon extract was commonly lemon oil in alcohol, and its strength varied a good deal from the modern product; note also that the recipe says to 'flavor slightly'. Start with two teaspoons of modern extract, or use the zest of a lemon.
- The sauce that is missingThe vanilla sauce promised in the title lives elsewhere in the book; the page only says a clear transparent sauce flavoured with vanilla or with red wine suits these rich rice puddings. A 'clear' sauce of the period would generally be a thickened sugar syrup, transparent rather than creamy.
- Leftovers as frittersThe recipe says only that leftover pudding can be used for fritters. Chilled overnight it cuts into firmer squares, which will handle better in the pan.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals aimed at hotel and restaurant bakers, generally credited to Jessup Whitehead of Chicago, and the quantities give the game away: nobody makes two quarts of cooked rice for a family. Baked rice puddings of this kind descend from the English rice pudding of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enriched here into something closer to a rice custard by eight yolks and a half pound of sugar. What is most characteristic of the book is the closing lecture: the author refuses to repeat himself, sends the reader back to the plain rice custard, and insists that once the base formula is understood the variations stop being mysteries. That was the pedagogy of the professional kitchen, where a cook learned one mother preparation and then rang changes on it, and it explains why a page headed "Vanilla Sauce" contains no sauce at all.