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Rice and Fruit
Boiled and Seasoned Rice Any Kind of Stewed Fruit, put through a sieve.
Beat the rice and fruit together until fluffy. Serve with cream or sauce.
A three-line formula rather than a recipe, of the kind cookbooks of the period expected a cook to fill in from experience. The proportions and the temperature at which you combine the two are what decide whether it turns out fluffy or gluey.
- What "seasoned rice" means hereIn a sweet course this most likely means rice boiled or simmered in milk with sugar and a little salt rather than savoury seasoning, though the recipe does not say. Vanilla, lemon peel or a scrape of nutmeg would all suit.
- Choose the rice for starchA short or medium grain rice cooked soft in milk gives the creamy body the dish depends on. Long grain cooked dry stays in separate grains and is much harder to beat up fluffy.
- Cool before beatingVery hot rice tends to work into a paste as the starch is released. Letting it cool at least to lukewarm before beating helps the mixture aerate rather than glue together.
- The sieved fruitAny thick stewed fruit purée works: apple, plum, apricot, prune, damson. Sieving is to remove skins, stones and fibre, so a food mill or a blender plus a strainer does the same job. The purée should be thick enough to mound on a spoon or it will slacken the rice.
- ProportionThe original gives none. Roughly equal volumes of cooked rice and thick purée is a reasonable starting point; more fruit gives a looser, more mousse-like result.
- Beating it fluffyThe instruction assumes sustained hand beating, several minutes of it; an electric mixer with the whisk does the same work faster. A stiffly whipped egg white folded in at this stage would lighten it further.
- Sauce and yield"Cream" here means pouring cream, unwhipped, or a thin custard sauce. The quantities are open, so scale to the amount of leftover rice you have; a cup or so of rice with an equal volume of purée fills two or three small glasses.
Sweetened rice thickened or lightened with fruit belongs to a broad family of nursery and invalid puddings that ran through nineteenth-century English and American cookery, where rice was cheap, digestible and endlessly stretchable. It sits among the cold sweets a young housekeeper could assemble from leftovers: yesterday's rice pudding, a jar of stewed plums, a jug of cream, no oven and no expense. The technique of beating a cooked starch with fruit pur too ee until it holds air is the same one behind the Scandinavian fruit creams of the same period, and the terseness of the entry is itself informative, since the compiler clearly assumed any reader would already know how to boil rice in milk and stew a pan of fruit.