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Rice Flummery
1057. Chop or grate the rind of half a lemon very fine, and pound half an ounce of bitter almonds; mix them together; then take a quart of new milk, a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, and the same of ground rice, stirring the latter.
A milk-and-ground-rice pudding set in a mould, flavoured in the old style with lemon rind and bitter almonds. The almonds are the problem: this one should be read rather than cooked.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them into warm milk does. Half an ounce is roughly a dozen kernels, and unprocessed bitter almonds are not sold as food in Britain or the United States for this reason. Use a current recipe if you want a rice flummery.
- Why Victorian cooks used them anywayBitter almonds were the standard source of the marzipan-like note now supplied by almond extract or a few drops of natural bitter-almond flavouring, both of which have the cyanogenic compounds removed. Older books call for them casually and in quantities that would not be printed today.
- New milk"New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, as opposed to skimmed or the previous day's. An imperial quart is about 1.14 litres (a US quart is about 950 ml, or 4 cups).
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone, chipped and pounded before use. A quarter pound is 4 oz, about half a cup of granulated sugar — a fairly sweet pudding by modern standards.
- Ground riceNot rice flour as sold for baking, but a coarser milled rice, closer to a fine semolina. It is what gives flummery its slight grain rather than a wholly smooth set; cream of rice is the nearest current equivalent.
- What flummery means hereA cooked starch pudding stirred over heat until it thickens, then poured into a wetted mould and turned out cold. Nineteenth-century flummeries were commonly set by starch or isinglass rather than by gelatine leaves, and were served with cream, stewed fruit or wine sauce.
Flummery began as a Welsh and West Country dish of oatmeal steeped in water until it soured, then boiled to a jelly — llymru in Welsh, which is generally taken to be the source of the English word. By the eighteenth century the name had migrated up the social scale and away from oats entirely: cookery books use it for elegant moulded creams thickened with ground rice, almonds or isinglass, sometimes coloured and served in sets of two or three shades. Nineteenth-century books range from treating it as a plain nursery and invalid pudding to presenting it as a supper-table showpiece. The almond flavouring in recipes like this one may be a survival of the older almond-milk flummeries, where pounded almonds did the work of both dairy and perfume.