Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Pink Rice
Pink Rice
This sweet is liked by children who are tired of rice pudding. Boil your rice and when tender mix in with it the juice of a boiled beetroot to which some sugar has been added. Turn it into a mold and when cold remove it and serve it with a spoonful of raspberry preserve on the top or with some red plums round it.
A wartime economy sweet that colours and lightly sweetens plain boiled rice with beet juice. The original assumes you know how a rice pudding behaves; the points below fill in the amounts it never gives.
- Working quantitiesAbout 1 cup (200 g) short-grain pudding rice simmered in 3-4 cups of milk or water gives four to six servings. A medium beetroot yields only a few tablespoons of juice once cooked and pressed, so use two if the colour is weak; the recipe gives no amounts at all.
- The hinge: the rice must be stickyThis unmolds only because the starch sets as it cools, so a short or round grain (arborio, carnaroli, or pudding rice) cooked soft in milk holds a shape better than a rinsed long-grain. Basmati or converted rice is likely to slump out of the mold.
- Getting the beet juiceBoil or roast the beetroot whole and unpeeled, then peel and either press the flesh through a sieve or grate it and squeeze it in a cloth. The cooking water alone is thin and earthy; the juice from the cooked flesh has more colour and sweetness.
- Add the juice off the heatBetalain, the pigment in beets, fades to brown with prolonged heat and turns dull in alkaline conditions. Stir the sweetened juice into the rice once it is off the stove for a bright pink rather than a muddy mauve.
- SugarThe recipe sweetens only the beet juice, which is not enough for most tastes now. Reckon on 3-4 tablespoons of sugar total, some cooked into the rice, and taste before molding.
- Molding and unmoldingRinse the mold with cold water or brush it very lightly with a neutral oil, fill while the rice is warm, press level, and chill at least three hours. Dip the base in hot water for a few seconds and invert onto a cold plate.
- ServingRaspberry preserve loosened with a spoonful of water pours better than jam straight from the jar. Poached red plums, or any tart red fruit, do the same job and cut the sweetness.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and its character is set by that circumstance: small quantities, cheap roots, and sweets built from what a household already had. Pink Rice belongs to a long European family of molded rice puddings — riz au lait turned out of a shape and served with fruit — and its trick of colouring food with beetroot instead of cochineal or a bought colouring is often said to have been a common domestic economy, beets being one of the crops Belgium and northern France grew in quantity for both table and sugar. The frank opening line, that children get tired of rice pudding, is the tone of the whole book: these are the improvisations of cooks feeding families on very little, written down by their hosts.