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Apricot Snowballs
Divide a sufficient quantity of boiled rice into six equal parts, and spread each over a small, wet pudding-cloth placed over a small basin to about a third of an inch in thickness. Cut half a dozen apricots only sufficient to extract the stones, fill the cavities with a little of the cooked rice, put them in the center of the rice, and draw the cloths gently around until the apricots are covered with the rice; then tie them securely, and put them in a steamer over a saucepan of boiling water and steam for ten minutes. Take out carefully and remove the cloths, put them on a dish and pour over a little sauce made from apricot syrup, and serve.
A Victorian steamed pudding in miniature: six rice-wrapped apricots, each shaped in a cloth. Nothing here is difficult, but the whole thing depends on the rice being right before it ever meets the steamer.
- The hinge: the rice must already be fully cookedTen minutes of steam only sets the shape and heats the fruit through; it will not soften hard grains. Use a short-grain pudding rice simmered until swollen and sticky — in milk with a little sugar for flavour, or in water if you want a cleaner taste — and let it cool enough to handle before spreading.
- Pudding-clothsSquares of unbleached muslin or doubled cheesecloth, about 10 inches, scalded and wrung out damp. Flouring the damp cloth lightly keeps the rice from welding to it. Kitchen string, tied with a little slack, gives the ball room to expand.
- "A small basin" is a mould, not an ingredientThe cloth is draped into a teacup or small pudding basin so it holds an open pocket while you line it with rice. Lift the whole thing out by the corners once the fruit is in.
- Rice quantityThe original says only "a sufficient quantity." Something in the region of 2 to 3 cups cooked rice should cover six balls at the stated third-of-an-inch thickness; start from about 3/4 cup raw short-grain and cook more if you run short.
- The apricotsFresh, ripe, and just soft enough to yield to a thumb. Slit along the seam, twist out the stone, and leave the fruit otherwise whole. Underripe fresh apricots will still be crunchy after ten minutes — poach them briefly first. Drained tinned apricot halves work and give you the syrup for the sauce at the same time.
- Steaming setupA folding steamer basket or a plate on a trivet inside a covered pot, water at a steady boil below, balls not touching each other. Keep the lid on; condensation dripping onto the cloths is not a problem here.
- The sauceApricot syrup means the poaching or canning liquid, reduced a little until it coats a spoon. A squeeze of lemon keeps it from being merely sweet.
- YieldSix, one per person, as a light dessert. They are best hot, so unwrap and sauce them at the table if you can.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was compiling at the tail end of a long British enthusiasm for the steamed "snowball" — a fruit, often an apple, encased in rice or suet pastry, boiled in a cloth, and turned out pale and domed. The cloth-boiled pudding itself is older than the pudding basin, and the technique persisted in hotel kitchens, where it needed no more than muslin and a pot of water. Apricots in place of apples mark this as a summer or a canned-goods dish: American commercial canning of California apricots was well established by the 1890s.