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Rice Cake
Blanch one pound of sweet and one-half ounce of bitter almonds, place them in a mortar with a small quantity of water and pound them to a pulp; then add two quarts of water and strain them through a cloth into a saucepan. Add twelve ounces of well-washed rice blanched in boiling water for a few minutes, also one-half pound of crushed loaf-sugar and a very little salt. Bring the liquor to the boil and stir gently and frequently until the rice is so well cooked that it will easily break when pressed between the fingers. Pound it all well again in a mortar, pass it through a fine sieve and stir in the yolks of half a dozen eggs to bind it and form a paste which should be quite firm. Put it into a well-buttered mould and bake it in a moderate oven until done.
This is an almond-milk rice pudding baked firm in a mould, and it hinges on a half ounce of bitter almonds — an ingredient that is restricted or banned for sale as food in most countries today for good reason.
- Why the bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with water accomplishes. A half ounce is on the order of a dozen kernels' worth of that compound. Straining out the solids and long boiling would carry off some of the volatile cyanide, but how much survives into the finished mould cannot be predicted.
- Not a matter of taste toleranceThe bitter almond is here for perfume rather than flavour balance; a fraction of an ounce scents a pound of sweet almonds. Use a current recipe if you want an almond rice cake.
- The almond milk stepThe sweet almonds are not an inclusion but the cooking liquid. Pounded with a little water, let down with two quarts more and strained through cloth, they yield almond milk — the rice is then simmered in it rather than in dairy. This is the technique the recipe is really built on, and it long predates the Waldorf.
- Loaf-sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold as a hard cone, chipped and crushed as needed. Half a pound of it is ordinary granulated sugar by weight.
- "A moderate oven""A moderate oven" in this period is usually read as somewhere in the region of 325-375F. The mould is effectively a baked custard-bound starch pudding, so it would have been set gently rather than browned.
- ScaleA pound of almonds, twelve ounces of rice, two quarts of liquid and six yolks make a very large mould.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation, published his Cook Book in 1896, and much of it is professional continental practice written down rather than American home cooking. This rice cake belongs to a long European line of almond-milk puddings: before the nineteenth century almond milk was a staple of grand and monastic kitchens alike, standing in for dairy on fast days and keeping better than milk in warm weather. The pairing of sweet almonds with a small measure of bitter ones was standard confectionery practice of the era — the bitter kernel supplied the intense marzipan scent that we now get from benzaldehyde-based almond extract. Recipes of this kind became rarer in print over the twentieth century, a decline often attributed to growing awareness of the toxicity of amygdalin and to restrictions on the sale of bitter almond kernels, though the connection is more traditional assumption than documented fact.