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Golden Rice
Put a quart of milk to boil, and, when boiling, add half a pound of good rice. When the rice is nearly cooked, add a pennyworth of saffron, stirring it in evenly. This is excellent, eaten cold with stewed quinces and cream.
A milk-cooked rice pudding, stovetop rather than baked, coloured and perfumed with saffron. The proportions are workable as written, but two things need translating: the saffron quantity and the stirring.
- QuantitiesA quart of milk to half a pound of rice is roughly 4 cups milk to 1 generous cup of raw rice. That is a fairly stiff result once cold, which is what you want if it is to be eaten in spoonfuls with fruit rather than drunk as a soup.
- "A pennyworth of saffron"Genuinely ambiguous, and there is no honest conversion; a penny's worth of an expensive spice was presumably a very small quantity. Start with a generous pinch of threads, about 1/4 teaspoon lightly crushed, and judge by colour and smell; saffron turns medicinal if overdone.
- Bloom the saffron firstCrush the threads and steep them in two tablespoons of the hot milk for a few minutes before stirring them in. Dropped in dry at the end they colour unevenly and much of the flavour stays locked in the thread.
- Which riceUse a short or medium grain pudding rice, not long grain or basmati. The starch that clouds and thickens the milk is the whole point here.
- Heat and stirringBring the milk just to a boil, then hold it at a bare simmer on the lowest heat and stir often. Milk and rice scorch on the bottom readily, and a scorched note will carry through the finished dish. Reckon on 30 to 40 minutes to "nearly cooked."
- SugarThe original adds none, which suits it as a foil to sweetened stewed quinces. If you are serving it plain, two to three tablespoons of sugar stirred in near the end is in keeping.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. It sets firm as it chills, so cover the surface with plastic wrap or a buttered paper to keep a skin from forming, and loosen it with a little cold milk before serving if it has gone too solid.
- The quincesRaw quince is inedibly hard and astringent; it needs peeling, coring and a long poach in sugar syrup, an hour or more, until it turns pink and tender. If you cannot get quinces, stewed pears with a strip of lemon peel stand in reasonably.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes collected from Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and its proceeds went to relief work; that origin explains the plainness of pages like this one, where the dish is described in a few sentences as someone would recite it from memory rather than read it from a book. Saffron-tinted rice puddings of this kind belonged to the older European tradition of gilding festive food yellow, a practice traceable through medieval and early modern cookery across the Low Countries and beyond, where saffron did the work of colour and scent that vanilla and cinnamon later took over. The pairing with quinces is a straightforwardly seasonal one: quinces are an autumn fruit that keeps, and they are often said to have been a more familiar garden presence in Belgium and England then than they are now. The "pennyworth" measure is itself a period marker, pricing the saffron rather than weighing it.