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Rock Cream
Boil one cup rice in a custard-kettle in sweet milk until soft, add two table-spoons loaf-sugar, a salt-spoon salt; pour into a dish and place on it lumps of jelly; beat the whites of five eggs and three table-spoons pulverized sugar to a stiff froth, flavor to taste, add one table-spoon rich cream, and drop the mixture on the rice. -Miss Libbie S. Wilcox, Madison.
A Victorian rice pudding dressed with a raw meringue froth. The vocabulary is easy enough to decode, but the topping is never cooked, which is why the dish cannot be recommended as written.
- Why the cautionThe whites of five eggs are beaten with sugar and dropped onto rice that has already been poured off the heat, so the froth is served raw. Uncooked egg white is a recognized Salmonella vehicle, and nothing in the method brings it to a temperature that would reduce that risk. If you want a meringue-topped rice pudding, use a current recipe with a baked or cooked meringue.
- Custard-kettleA double boiler: an inner pan set over simmering water. Milk scorches easily over direct heat, which is presumably why the vessel is specified here rather than an open pot.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, named to distinguish it from the buttermilk and sour milk that appear all through this book. The recipe gives no quantity; a cup of rice cooked to softness in milk generally takes four to five cups, added gradually.
- Loaf-sugar and pulverized sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone, equivalent to ordinary granulated. Pulverized sugar is finer than granulated and coarser than modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch; superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon.
- Lumps of jellyFirm fruit jelly, currant or quince being likely choices, spooned in dabs over the warm rice rather than spread. Jam or preserves behave differently and will bleed into the rice.
- YieldA cup of raw rice cooked in milk makes enough for six to eight small servings.
Rock cream turns up under that name in a number of nineteenth-century American and English household books. The name is usually taken to refer to the rough peaks of froth heaped over the rice rather than to any ingredient, though that is traditional explanation rather than documented fact. It belongs to a large Victorian family of showy, mostly-white cold sweets built on cheap bulk starches and expensive eggs and sugar: floating island, snow pudding, whipped syllabubs, and rice or tapioca puddings crowned with beaten whites. Like its sister volumes from the same Midwestern publishing tradition, the book credits its recipes to named contributors, which is why this one carries Miss Wilcox's name and town and why it reads like a note passed between cooks rather than a tested formula, with the quantity of milk and the flavoring both left to the reader's judgment.