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Rice with Apples
Pare, quarter, and core three or four mediumsized, tart apples. Cook them carefully in a syrup made of one cup of sugar and one cup of boiling water and one slice of lemon, being careful to keep the apples whole. While they are cooking put from one to two cups of cold cooked rice in a double boiler. Add one tablespoonful of sugar and one tablespoonful sweet cream to each cup of rice, stirring them in lightly with a fork. Cover and let heat thoroughly. Pile the rice in the center or a glass dish and place the apples as a border around it. Pour the remaining syrup over all and garnish with a few candied cherries. This can be served cold if desired.
A leftover-rice dessert that depends entirely on the apple quarters holding their shape. Everything else is reheating.
- The hinge: gentle poachingThe syrup should barely tremble, not boil. Apple quarters break down fast at a rolling boil; hold them at a bare simmer, uncrowded in a wide pan, and turn them once rather than stirring. Eight to fifteen minutes depending on variety.
- Apple choice"Tart" here means a firm cooking apple that keeps its edges. Granny Smith, Braeburn or Northern Spy hold; McIntosh and most soft eating apples collapse into sauce.
- Syrup ratioEqual cups of sugar and water make a light syrup that will still be thin at the end. If you want it to coat the dish rather than pool, lift the apples out and reduce the syrup for a few minutes before pouring.
- "Sweet cream"Means fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream common in period kitchens. Heavy or whipping cream is the right substitute.
- Double boilerIt exists here so the cold rice warms without scorching or drying. A covered saucepan over the lowest heat with a spoonful of milk works as well; fluff with a fork, never a spoon, or the grains mash.
- Candied cherriesThe period garnish was glacé cherries. Fresh or frozen sour cherries, or a spoonful of tart jam, read better to modern palates.
- YieldPerhaps four small servings from the one to two cups of cooked rice and three or four apples the recipe allows. It is a modest dish built on rice already cooked and gone cold.
- Served coldChilling firms the rice noticeably. If serving cold, stir in a little extra cream just before it goes to the table.
Books of this kind treated the leftover as a moral matter as much as a culinary one: waste was a failure of management, and a cook who could turn yesterday's boiled rice into a glass dish with a border of poached apples had turned thrift into presentation. Rice pudding and rice with fruit were long-standing English and American nursery foods, but the arrangement described here center mound, fruit border, syrup poured over, cherries on top is often associated with a fashion for composed, molded desserts served in cut glass. The instruction to pile the rice in a glass dish is doing real work: it signals that this is a company dessert, not scraps, and the sugar syrup and cream are what buy it that promotion.