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Chocolate Rice Meringue
2 cups milk 1/4 cup rice 1/3 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter 1/3 cup sugar 1 square melted chocolate ½ teaspoon vanilla ½ cup seeded raisins Whites two eggs ½ cup heavy cream Scald milk, add rice and salt, and cook until rice is soft. Add butter, sugar, chocolate, vanilla, and raisins. Cut and fold in the whites of eggs, beaten until stiff, and cream, beaten until stiff. Pour into a buttered baking-dish, and bake fifteen minutes. Cover with a meringue made of the whites of three eggs, six tablespoons powdered sugar, and one-half teaspoon vanilla; then brown in a moderate oven. 2 cups flour
A hot rice pudding lightened with whipped cream and beaten whites, then capped with meringue. A few of the printed quantities do not survive intact, so read the list against the method before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for scalded milk and rice, but no amounts for either appear in the ingredient list as printed here. The list also ends with a stray "2 cups flour" that belongs to no step in the method. Any figure you settle on is your own judgement rather than the book's.
- Fractions to checkThe cream and raisins both read as "1½ cup" against a rice quantity that is missing altogether, and 1½ cups of whipped cream would swamp most rice bases. Half-cup quantities give a pudding that holds its shape, but this is a reading of a damaged list, not the printed text.
- A square of chocolateOne square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, which is still sold in one-ounce squares. Melt it over hot water or in short bursts in the microwave; it seizes easily over direct heat.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" here means the seeds have been removed by hand, not that the fruit was grown seedless. Ordinary dark seedless raisins are the direct substitute.
- Cool the rice firstThis is the hinge. Beaten whites and whipped cream collapse into hot rice and the pudding bakes dense. Let the sweetened rice come down to warm — no hotter than a fingertip can rest in — before folding anything in.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term often meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar on shelves today. Superfine or caster sugar dissolves into the whites more cleanly and gives a less chalky meringue.
- Oven temperatures"Moderate oven" is undefined here; it is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. Bake the pudding the fifteen minutes the recipe gives, then return it with the meringue until the peaks are set and lightly coloured.
- Egg countTwo whites go into the pudding and three into the meringue, so five whites in all. The five yolks keep a day or two, covered, for custard or a sauce.
- YieldWith the milk and rice quantities missing, no dish size or serving count can be given from the text. Serve it hot; the meringue weeps as it stands.
Rice puddings were the workhorse dessert of the American nineteenth-century kitchen — cheap starch, milk, and a slow oven — and by the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School the challenge was to make them look like something. Hence this construction: the plain baked rice is enriched with an ounce of chocolate, folded with whipped cream and whites so it rises rather than sits, and then hidden under a meringue that turns a nursery dish into a company one. The one-ounce square of unsweetened chocolate was a standard grocery item in New England, where Baker's had been grinding cocoa beans in Dorchester since the late eighteenth century, and Boston cookbooks called for it freely. The meringue lid, browned rather than fully dried, is the same trick applied to lemon pie and to "queen of puddings" in English books of the same decades.