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Pineapple Cream Dessert
2 cups boiled rice
2 cups heavy cream
2 cups shredded pineapple
½ cup powdered sugar
Boil the rice slowly in slightly salted water, until tender; place in a colander and let cold water run over the rice until the kernels are free from starch; stir with a fork to separate kernels, being careful not to break or mash them; add the pineapple and sugar. Whip the cream stiff, fold half of the amount in the rice. Serve in glasses; heap whipped cream on top and decorate with maraschino cherries. Serve very cold.
A cold rice dessert built on the same logic as riz à l'impératrice, but with no custard and no gelatin — it stands or falls on the texture of the rice.
- The hinge: rinse the rice coldRinsing the cooked rice under cold running water until the water runs clear is what keeps this from becoming rice pudding. Leftover surface starch will bind the grains into a paste once the cream goes in, so rinse thoroughly and drain well.
- Which riceUse a long-grain white rice, which holds its shape and separates readily. Arborio, sushi rice or any short-grain variety is bred to release starch and will defeat the recipe. Two cups cooked is roughly two-thirds of a cup raw.
- Drain harder than you thinkThe rice must be genuinely dry before it meets the whipped cream, or the cream will slacken and weep in the glass. Spread it on a towel-lined tray for ten minutes after rinsing.
- Pineapple"Shredded pineapple" was a standard canned pineapple product, so canned is the likely intention here. Drain it well and squeeze lightly. If you use fresh, note that raw pineapple's bromelain gradually turns dairy bitter, so assemble and eat within a couple of hours.
- Powdered sugarIn modern terms confectioners' sugar, cut with a little starch, though in older American books "powdered sugar" could also mean plain finely ground sugar with no starch added. Either dissolves readily into cold fruit and cream, which is the point; granulated will stay gritty.
- The creamHeavy cream whipped to soft-stiff peaks. Half is folded into the rice, half heaped on top — do not whip past the point where it holds a peak or the folded portion will break into butter grains as you work it through the rice.
- Maraschino cherriesBy the 1920s the American product was largely brine-cured, dyed and packed in sugar syrup rather than preserved in maraschino liqueur. Modern jarred cherries are the sweeter descendant; Italian-style Luxardo cherries are closer to the older liqueur-preserved sort.
- Yield and servingSix generous coupes or eight smaller ones. Chill the glasses and assemble no more than an hour ahead — the rice firms and dulls if it sits overnight in the refrigerator.
Cold rice folded into sweetened whipped cream is often said to be a thrifty descendant of riz à l'impératrice, the nineteenth-century French dish of rice cooked in milk, bound with custard and gelatin, studded with candied fruit and turned out of a mould. This version dispenses with the mould, the custard and the labour, and belongs to an American tradition of desserts built on canned pineapple and dyed maraschino cherries. Its presence in a menu-planning collection is telling: this is a dessert designed to be assembled from what is already in the pantry and a bowl of leftover boiled rice, served cold in glasses so it needs no baking, no unmoulding and no last-minute heat in the kitchen.