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Riz Conde
For one and one-half pints of milk half a breakfast-cupful of rice. Let it boil with sugar and vanilla; strain the whole. Add one-half pint of cream, well beaten, five leaves of gelatine (melted). Mix the whole and pour in a mold which has been wet. When turned out of the mold, put apricots or other fruit on the top. Pour the juice over all.
A cold moulded rice cream, thickened with gelatine and finished with fruit. The recipe assumes you know how rice pudding behaves, so the two things it leaves out are the long slow simmer and the temperature at which the cream goes in.
- The hinge: fold the cream in at the right momentThe gelatine must be dissolved and the rice cooled to lukewarm before the whipped cream goes in. Fold into hot rice and the cream collapses to liquid; wait until the mixture has begun to set and you get streaks and lumps that no amount of stirring will smooth.
- Which pintThe book was compiled in England from Belgian cooks' recipes, so the pints are most likely imperial (20 fl oz), giving 30 fl oz milk and 10 fl oz cream. If you read them as US pints you get 24 and 8. Either works; the rice simply needs to cook until the milk is almost entirely absorbed.
- A breakfast-cupfulRoughly 8-10 fl oz, so half a cupful is about 4-5 fl oz, i.e. around ½ cup of raw rice. Use a short-grain pudding rice — arborio or Spanish bomba behave correctly. Long-grain will not release the starch that gives the dish its body.
- Cook it slowly, not at a boil"Let it boil" means a bare simmer over 35-45 minutes, stirred often, until the grains are soft and the milk thick. A real boil scorches the milk on the pan bottom and the burnt taste carries through the whole mould.
- "Strain the whole"Most likely straining the cooked milk and rice to get the vanilla pod out before the cream and gelatine go in; it can also be read as passing the rice through a sieve, in which case push it through with the back of a ladle while warm.
- Five leaves of gelatineModern leaf gelatine runs about 2 g a sheet, so five sheets is roughly 10 g — near a standard sachet and a half of powder. Soak the leaves in cold water until floppy, squeeze them out, and melt them into a little of the hot rice mixture rather than adding them to the cold cream.
- VanillaThis may mean a split pod simmered in the milk and fished out before straining, or a vanilla sugar; bottled essence was also readily available by this date. A pod gives the fullest flavour; if using extract, add it off the heat, since prolonged simmering drives it off.
- Wetting the mould, and getting it outRinsing the mould with cold water and leaving it wet is the period trick for a clean release, and it still works. Chill at least 4 hours, then dip the mould two or three seconds in hot water and invert onto a cold plate.
- The fruit and juicePoached or good tinned apricot halves with their syrup are the traditional finish; reduce the syrup slightly so it glazes rather than floods the plate. A spoonful of kirsch in the syrup is the classic French treatment.
- YieldAbout 1.5 litres of set mixture — six to eight servings from a single large mould, or eight to ten small dariole moulds.
Riz Condé is the Belgian and French kitchen's version of a dish that turns up across nineteenth-century European cookery as riz à la Condé: sweetened rice cooked down in vanilla milk, moulded, and served with apricots and their syrup. The name is generally traced to the princely house of Condé, in the same way that so many nineteenth-century garnishes carry an aristocratic label attached long after the fact by restaurant cooks; the association with apricots is consistent enough across old repertoires to be part of the definition rather than a suggestion. The gelatine and whipped cream here push it away from the plain nursery rice pudding towards an entremets — a cold moulded sweet meant to be turned out whole at table, which is why the recipe fusses about wetting the mould. Its appearance in this collection is a small piece of wartime history: the book gathers dishes from Belgian households displaced to Britain in 1914-15, and a mould of rice, milk and preserved apricots is exactly the sort of company dessert a cook could reconstruct far from home with what was still on the shelf.