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Saffron Rice
Wash the rice in cold water, heat it in a little water and add a dust of salt. Flavor some milk (enough to cover the rice) with vanilla, and pour it on the rice. Let it cook in the oven for an hour and a quarter. Take it from the fire, and stir in the yolks only of two eggs, or of one only, if wished. Sweeten the whole with sugar, and color it with a little saffron. Turn it out, and let it get very cold.
This is a Flemish-style baked rice pudding, sweetened, perfumed with vanilla and tinted yellow with saffron, then chilled and unmoulded. The original assumes you know the proportions, so a few numbers help.
- Quantities to work fromThe recipe gives none. For six servings use about 1 cup (7 oz) short-grain pudding rice, roughly 1 quart whole milk, 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar and a good pinch of saffron. Long-grain rice will not break down into the creamy mass the dish depends on.
- Oven heatA baked rice pudding of this kind wants a slow oven, 300-325F. An hour and a quarter is realistic at that heat in a covered dish; the rice should be soft and the milk mostly absorbed but still loose, since it firms considerably as it cools.
- "Heat it in a little water"Most likely a brief parboil to swell the grain, five to ten minutes at a simmer. The recipe does not say to drain, and the washing step earlier has already taken off surface starch.
- The saffronCrush the threads and steep them in a few spoonfuls of the warm milk for ten minutes before adding, or the color stays in streaks. A pinch, about 1/4 teaspoon of threads, colors a quart; more turns the flavor medicinal and metallic.
- Flavoring the milkIn 1915 "flavor with vanilla" could mean either a split pod infused in the hot milk or bottled essence, both in common use. A pod steeped for twenty minutes off the heat suits the method here; a teaspoon or two of extract is the substitute.
- The yolks are the hingeThey go in off the heat, into pudding that is still very hot. They enrich it and help it set, though the cooked rice does much of the setting on its own. Stir them in quickly so they thicken rather than scramble, and for safety bring the mixture back over low heat, stirring, until it reaches 160F before chilling.
- "Turn it out"Bake in a buttered mould or basin, chill at least four hours, then loosen and invert. The recipe expects it to unmould with either one yolk or two; with one it will probably be the softer of the two.
A Belgian Cook-Book was assembled in England in 1915 from recipes given by Belgians displaced by the German invasion, and sold in aid of refugee relief; many of its measurements are notably vague. Sweet baked rice with milk is a fixture of Flemish home cooking, the rijstpap served at village fairs and on feast days, and the saffron here does the work that a yellow tint has long done in festival baking across the Low Countries, where saffron-colored rice tarts and doughs are, by a tradition more often repeated than documented, linked to the spice's status as a costly, celebratory ingredient. The dish also shows the frugal logic of the period: rice, milk and a yolk or two make a substantial dessert, and the recipe explicitly allows for using only one egg if that is what the house can spare.