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Rice Apples
Boil half a pound rice in a custard-kettle till tender in one quart milk, sweetened with half tea-cup sugar; pare and core with apple corer seven or eight good-cooking apples, place in slightly buttered baking-dish, put a tea-spoon of jam or jelly into each cavity, and fill with rich cream; put the rice in around apples, leaving top uncovered; bake thirty minutes, then cover with the whites of two eggs, sift on sugar, and return to the oven for ten minutes. Serve with sweetened cream. - Mrs. S. M. Guy, Mechanicsburg.
A baked rice pudding built around whole cored apples, from the era when rice was cooked slowly in milk over water rather than boiled in a pan. Most of what needs translating is equipment and oven heat.
- Custard-kettleThis is a double boiler. The rice cooks in milk over simmering water so the milk cannot scorch or catch, which it will do quickly over direct heat. A heatproof bowl over a saucepan does the same job; expect 45 minutes to an hour for the grains to go tender.
- Half a pound of riceAbout 1 1/8 cups of raw white rice, which with a quart of milk gives a loose, creamy pudding rather than a stiff one. Short or medium grain gives the best texture. If the rice drinks the milk before it softens, add more milk a little at a time — it should still be pourable when it goes into the dish.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature; period ranges were rarely fitted with a reliable thermometer and cooks judged heat by hand. A moderate oven, around 350F, works for both stages: 30 minutes for the apples and rice, then 10 minutes more for the meringue.
- The whites of two eggsBeat them stiff before spreading. Unbeaten whites poured over a hot pudding will simply set into a thin skin. The sifted sugar goes on after the whites are spread, and at 350F for ten minutes the meringue browns lightly rather than crisping through.
- Choose the apples for the time givenThirty minutes will not soften a firm apple all the way through. Use a variety that collapses readily — Bramley or McIntosh — and pick fruit of even size so they finish together. Larger or denser apples want longer, with the meringue added only at the end.
- Rich cream in the cavityHeavy cream. It cooks down into the jam to make a small pocket of sauce inside each apple. Fill only to the top of the cavity or it will run out as the apple softens.
- YieldSeven or eight apples, one per person, with the rice as its own portion around them. Serve warm; the pudding stiffens considerably as it cools.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to a family of American compilations generally traced back to Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first issued in Ohio in the 1870s and reprinted through the following decades under regional titles for different markets — which is why a contributor from Mechanicsburg, an Ohio village, turns up in a book called Dixie. The dish itself is two thrifty nursery staples pushed together: milk-boiled rice, long-established English and American pudding fare, and the baked apple stuffed with jam. The meringue lid is a common finish for a milk pudding of this kind, and the recipe closes with an instruction to serve with sweetened cream.