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Rice Pudding with Walnuts
Put one-half pound of rice into a mortar, and pound it rather coarse; turn it into a saucepan with three quarts of boiling water, flavor it with rose-water, and stir over the fire until thick. Sweeten the mixture to the taste with sugar, and pour it into a dish. Peel a few walnuts, place them in a mortar and pound them. When the pudding is cold, sift the pounded walnuts over it, and serve.
A rice porridge more than a baked pudding, set cold and dusted with ground walnuts. The proportions are the thing to watch.
- The water is a lotHalf a pound of rice (about 1 1/4 cups) to three quarts of water is roughly a 10:1 ratio, far wetter than modern rice pudding. Expect to cook it down for a long time, or start with two quarts and add more only as it thickens.
- Pounding the riceCoarsely cracked rice cooks faster and releases starch, which is what thickens the dish; a few short pulses in a food processor does the same work as the mortar. Do not reduce it to flour or you get paste.
- Rose-waterStill sold, but modern extracts vary enormously in strength. Start with a teaspoon in the whole pot, taste, and add more at the end, since the perfume cooks off.
- StirringWith no dairy and no egg, scorching is the only real risk. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat low once it begins to thicken, and stir across the bottom rather than around the edge.
- SweeteningSugar goes in after the rice is soft. Added early it slows the grains' absorption of water and lengthens the cooking.
- "Peel a few walnuts"This means rubbing the papery brown skin off blanched walnut kernels, which removes most of the bitterness. Pour boiling water over shelled walnuts, let them stand a few minutes, and slip the skins off; toasted walnuts work if you skip the step.
- Setting and servingPoured into a dish and left to cool, it firms as it stands, though how firmly depends on how far it was cooked down. Half a pound of rice gives roughly six to eight servings.
Rice cooked to a thick sweet cream, scented with rose-water and finished with pounded nuts, resembles a family of dishes that includes the medieval European blancmange, which is generally traced back to Persian and Arab confectionery, where rice or rice flour, sugar, rose-water and almonds or walnuts were common company. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 compendium is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen was a working repository as much as a fashionable one: alongside the elaborate hotel dishes he set down many plain and old-fashioned preparations, some of which appear to derive from earlier household books. The recipe is notably free of milk, eggs and butter, which places it near the water-based rice preparations sometimes given to invalids and children, and which would presumably keep better than a custard in a period before reliable refrigeration.