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Rice Pudding with Apples
Put ten ounces of well-washed rice into a basin of boiling water, blanch, drain, refresh it in cold water, put it into a saucepan, covering to twice its height with boiled milk, and set it to boil. As quickly as it commences to cook, move the saucepan to the side of the fire, sweeten to taste, and cook gently until the rice is soft. Add a small quantity of chopped lemon peel, two or three ounces of stoned raisins and finally five or six eggs, working one well in before another is added. Let the mixture cool; sprinkle a buttered charlotte-mould over with breadcrumbs, turn in the mixture, stand it in a moderate oven, and bake it for forty-five or fifty minutes. Remove it, cut out a thin round from the top, and scoop out the inside, taking care not to leave the sides too thin. Fill the cavity with cooked minced apples, well mixed with a little apricot marmalade, place the round back in its place, turn the pudding out onto a dish over a little more of the apricot marmalade, sprinkle over some fine white sugar, and serve at once.
A grand hotel pudding built in two stages: a baked rice custard hollowed out like a loaf and refilled with apple. The instructions assume a professional pastry section, so a few things need translating.
- Oven temperatureThe book says only "a moderate oven"; that is usually read as somewhere around 350F. The mould sits in a dry oven with no water bath, so check at 40 minutes; the centre should be set but still slightly yielding.
- The hinge: cool before bakingThe hinge: work the eggs in one at a time -- The recipe adds the eggs singly to the sweetened cooked rice, each one worked in before the next, and cools the mixture afterwards, before it goes into the mould. Add them one at a time off the fiercest heat, or they set in grains rather than binding the pudding.
- Blanching the riceThe initial boil-drain-refresh removes surface starch so the grains stay separate in the milk. Use a short or medium grain rice; ten ounces is about 1 1/2 cups dry, which swells enormously.
- "Twice its height with boiled milk"The milk goes in scalded rather than cold, poured to twice the depth of the rice in the pan rather than to any fixed measure. The rice should absorb most of it; drain any excess before the eggs go in.
- Charlotte mouldA plain straight-sided tinned tin, about 1 1/2 to 2 quarts, slightly tapered so the pudding turns out. A souffle dish or a deep cake tin of the same capacity does the same job. Butter it heavily and coat with dry breadcrumbs or the pudding will not release.
- Apricot marmaladePeriod usage means apricot jam sieved smooth, not a citrus-style marmalade. Warm and strain a good apricot preserve; it doubles as the filling binder and the sauce on the plate.
- The minced applesCook peeled, chopped apples down to a thick compote with very little liquid. A wet filling will soak the shell and collapse the pudding when it is turned out.
- Turning outRest the baked pudding 10 minutes before hollowing, and hollow it while warm. Leave the walls a good half inch thick, and unmould onto the sauced dish rather than trying to move it afterwards.
- YieldEight to ten servings. It is a substantial dish and wants nothing more than the apricot sauce beneath it.
Rice puddings enriched with eggs and hollowed for a filling belong to the classical French repertoire that Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen worked in, where such a dish would be labelled a riz or pouding de riz a la something depending on what went into the cavity. The technique of baking a starch case, cutting a lid, scooping and refilling descends from the same logic as the charlotte and the vol-au-vent: the mould is the point, and the hidden interior is the surprise. Apricot glaze under and over a moulded sweet was a common feature of nineteenth-century pastry work, valued as much for its shine as its flavour. Oscar himself was a maitre d'hotel rather than a chef, and the book gathers the house's working formulas.