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Boiled Rice and Cream
Pour one pint of cold milk into a saucepan, add one pint of cold water, and one-half saltspoonful of salt, and place the pan on a hot range; when boiling, throw in four ounces of well-cleaned raw rice, and with a spatula stir slowly and constantly at the bottom for twenty-five minutes while it is cooking. Take the pan from the fire, and add immediately four ounces of powdered sugar and one ounce of butter, and mix well together with a spatula for two or three minutes. Transfer the mixture into another vessel, and stand it in a cold place for one hour. Whisk to a stiff froth one pint of rich cream, cover the basin with a napkin, and let it stand for twenty minutes; should there be any milk settled at the bottom, pour it off, and add to the cream two ounces of powdered sugar and one teaspoonful of vanilla flavoring; then with a wire whisk beat together for two minutes longer; take the rice from the vessel, drop it gradually into the whipped cream and mix the whole slowly and carefully together for three or four minutes. Line a two-quart melon-shaped mould with three ounces of peach marmalade, fill the mould with the preparation, place on the cover, and after putting a little broken ice at the bottom of the pail, lay in the mould and cover carefully and entirely with broken ice, and freeze for one hour. Have ready a vessel with two quarts of lukewarm water, lift up the mould from the pail, dip it into the water, wash off the ice and raise it up immediately, remove the cover, turn the preparation onto a cold dish, and send it to the table.
A molded rice cream in the French style, closer to riz à l'impératrice than to anything frozen. Most of the work is in getting the rice cold enough before it meets the cream.
- The hinge: chill the rice completelyThe hour in a cold place is not optional padding. Rice even slightly warm will melt the whipped cream on contact and the whole thing will slump into a soupy mass. Spread it in a shallow pan so it cools through, and stir it once or twice to keep it from setting in a single block.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon. It is there to season the rice, not to be tasted.
- The riceFour ounces is a generous half cup raw. Use a short- or medium-grain rice such as arborio or Carolina-style; long-grain stays separate and gives a grainy rather than creamy body. Twenty-five minutes of constant stirring works the starch out much as stirring does in a risotto, though here the liquid goes in all at once, and that is what gives the creamy body.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this means granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match; ordinary granulated dissolves well enough in hot rice but may stay gritty in the cream.
- "Rich cream"Heavy or whipping cream, the higher the fat the better. The instruction to let the whipped cream stand under a napkin and pour off any settled milk reflects unhomogenised dairy; with modern cream far less will separate, though whipped cream left standing can still weep a little.
- Freezing with plain iceBroken ice alone sits at 32F and will chill the mould firmly but not freeze it — this dish is meant to set cold and creamy, not hard. If you want it genuinely frozen, ice must be packed with rock salt in layers. A modern freezer will do the same job in two to three hours, though the texture goes firmer than intended.
- UnmouldingThe lukewarm dip should last a few seconds only. Longer and the peach marmalade lining, which is the decorative surface, will slide off with the melt.
- Mould and yieldA two-quart melon mould is large; any two-quart bowl, charlotte tin or loaf pan works if you line it with plastic wrap for an easier release. Figure eight to ten servings.
This is the Waldorf's version of riz à l'impératrice, the moulded rice-and-cream dessert that ran through French restaurant cookery from the Second Empire onward and is generally traced to the kitchens of that period — the name nods to the Empress Eugénie, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The formula is broadly the same in outline, for all the variants: rice cooked soft in sweetened milk, cooled, then lightened with whipped cream and set in a mould, usually with fruit or liqueur worked in. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the 1896 book, was not himself the chef, and the recipes read as a record of what a large American hotel kitchen of the period actually turned out under French discipline. The reliance on a pail of broken ice rather than any mechanical refrigeration is consistent with the 1890s, though it narrows the page no further: household and even hotel cold storage then still meant ice delivered by the block, and every moulded cream, bombe and ice depended on it.