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Almond and Rice Pudding
Put some milk and a little ground rice into a saucepan to boil; then pour into a basin, and when it is quite cold, mix in some sugar and warmed butter, six yolks and nine whites of eggs, and a few blanched and shred sweet almonds. Put into a buttered dish, and bake until well done. Turn it out onto a dish, cover it with pieces of almond stuck into it, and serve.
A Victorian-style baked rice custard written in the older shorthand style, with no quantities at all beyond the eggs. The egg ratio is the one fixed point, and everything else has to be built around it.
- Working quantitiesSix yolks and nine whites is roughly 1 quart of milk's worth of custard. A workable reading is 1 quart milk, 3-4 oz (about 3/4 cup) ground rice, 4-5 oz sugar, 2 oz butter, and 3-4 oz almonds. Nothing in the original contradicts these proportions, but they are inference, not instruction.
- Ground riceThis is milled rice, not rice grains and not the modern glutinous rice flour sold for mochi. In older British usage ground rice is a slightly coarser grind than rice flour, but plain white rice flour from the baking aisle behaves much the same way: it thickens on the boil and sets firm once cold.
- Cool it before the eggsThe instruction to let the rice base go "quite cold" is the hinge of the recipe. Stirring six yolks into hot porridge scrambles them, and the mixture will bake grainy rather than smooth.
- The extra whitesThree whites more than yolks gives extra setting power, which helps the pudding hold its shape when turned out. The original says only to mix them in; whisking them to soft peaks and folding them in last is a modern option, not something the text calls for.
- OvenThe original gives no guidance beyond 'bake until well done'. A modern equivalent is 325-350F until the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean, roughly 45 minutes to an hour in a buttered 1.5-2 quart dish. A water bath is not called for but guards against a curdled edge.
- Turning outLet it stand 15-20 minutes off the heat before inverting. Straight from the oven it will slump; fully cold it will stick.
- Blanched and shred almondsBlanching means pouring boiling water over whole almonds and slipping off the skins; "shred" here means cut lengthwise into slivers, not ground. Blanched slivered almonds from a packet do the same job.
- Sweet almondsThe specification of sweet almonds distinguishes them from bitter almonds, which older kitchens used for flavouring and which are not generally sold for eating in the US today. Use ordinary supermarket almonds.
- YieldServes six to eight as a dessert, warm or at room temperature.
Almond and rice puddings of this kind were long established in English and French cookery before Oscar Tschirky set them down for the Waldorf: ground rice boiled in milk, enriched with eggs and butter, and perfumed with almonds belongs to the same family as the medieval blancmange, which was built on pounded almonds and rice (usually with shredded capon as well). The distinction the recipe draws between sweet and bitter almonds was a live one in nineteenth-century kitchens, where bitter almonds supplied the flavouring we now get from extract. Its presence in a hotel cook book of 1896 is telling: the Waldorf's kitchen leaned on the French repertoire, but a good many of the puddings Oscar recorded look to have come out of the English domestic tradition, written in the same terse, quantity-free manner as the receipt books of the period.