No. 3005

Border of Rice with Bananas

Bordures de Riz aux Bananes

Make a consistent rice cream preparation (No. 160) flavored with vanilla, and finish it with a few egg-yolks. Divide this into two portions, and into one incorporate a salpicon of chestnuts cut up small and candied pineapple cut in quarter-inch dice. Butter and sugar a plain border or savarin mold (Fig. 139), and with the rice which has no fruit cover the sides, then fill the mold with the rice and fruit, smooth the top and set this border in a sautoir with hot water reaching halfway up, and push it into a slack oven for twenty-five minutes. Unmold the border on a dish, and ornament the top with a handsome circle of angelica lozenges and candied cherries, and surround the base with preserved plums. Peel some fine bananas, cut them up into transversal slices a quarter of an inch thick, plunge them into a thick maraschino syrup, let simmer for a few moments, then drain and range them in a pyramid in the center of the border. Brush the top over with apricot marmalade (No. 3675), and dredge finely chopped pistachios over all; heat the border in the oven for twenty minutes, and serve with a sauce-boat of sauce made with apple jelly (No. 3668), diluted with a little syrup and flavored with maraschino.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have his rice cream (No. 160) and apricot marmalade already on hand, and that you can read cross-references. Here is what the recipe needs in a kitchen without a brigade behind it.

The rice cream baseNo. 160 is short-grain rice cooked slowly in sweetened, vanilla-scented milk until it will hold a shape on the spoon, cooked covered until the grains have burst and the mixture is stiff. The "few egg-yolks" go in off the heat, and they help set the border when it bakes.
"Slack oven"A low oven; somewhere around 300F is a reasonable modern reading. The border is a custard-bound rice pudding in a water bath, and too much heat will curdle the yolks so the unmolded ring weeps.
SalpiconSimply a mixture of small even dice. Here it means cooked chestnuts, cut small as Ranhofer directs, and candied pineapple cut in quarter-inch dice. Keep the dice small so the border turns out cleanly.
Savarin mold and the water bathA ring mold, buttered then dusted with sugar rather than flour so the surface caramelizes lightly and releases. A sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan; any roasting pan holding water halfway up the mold will do. Let the baked border rest 10 minutes before unmolding.
The second heatingTwenty minutes more in the oven after glazing sets the apricot glaze and warms the assembled dish through. In a home kitchen 8 to 10 minutes in a slack oven is enough — longer and the banana slices collapse and the pistachios darken.
Bananas in maraschino syrup"simmer a few moments" means very briefly. The slices should absorb syrup and hold their edges; a full simmer turns them to purée. Maraschino here is the cherry-stone liqueur, not the sweet red cocktail-cherry brine.
Angelica and candied cherriesCandied angelica stem, cut in diamonds, is still sold by baking suppliers but is scarce; candied citron peel or thin strips of candied lime give the same green-to-amber contrast. "Preserved plums" means whole plums in heavy syrup, drained.
SauceApple jelly loosened with a little sugar syrup and finished with maraschino — thin it only to the consistency of pouring cream, as it is meant to pool, not coat.
YieldA standard 8- to 9-inch ring mold serves 8 to 10. It must be served warm; chilled, the rice firms and the glaze dulls.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the record of some thirty years cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the period's habit of building sweet courses architecturally: a molded ring of rice as the plinth, fruit heaped in the well, a glaze and chopped nuts to finish. Rice borders were a stock device of nineteenth-century French pastry work — cheap, sturdy, and able to carry whatever expensive fruit the house wanted to display. The bananas are the tell. By the 1880s and 1890s steamers were landing fruit from the Caribbean at New York and New Orleans in quantity, and bananas moved within a generation from curiosity to something a restaurant could pile up in a pyramid without comment. Set beside candied pineapple, angelica, maraschino and preserved plums, they read here less as an everyday fruit than as one more item in a deliberate show of imported abundance.