No. 3106

Rice Pudding, Fruit Sauce

Pouding au Riz, Sauce aux Fruits

Wash one pound of rice; blanch and cook in two quarts of milk and cream, half of each, proceeding the same as for rice pudding (No. 3105); when done sweeten with six ounces of sugar, finish it with a grated orange peel, a handful of chopped almonds, and two ounces of butter; remove it from the fire, and when almost cold incorporate fifteen to eighteen egg-yolks, one by one, without ceasing to beat up the preparation; add also twenty ounces of candied fruits cut in quarter-inch squares, and lastly twelve to fourteen egg-whites beaten to a stiff froth. With this fill five buttered and floured molds; place them in a deep baking-pan with hot water, and poach the puddings for nearly one hour in a slack oven. At the last moment unmold on a dish, cover them liberally with apricot and kirsch sauce (No. 3001), and serve separately a sauce-boatful of Bischoff sauce; for this see fried cream Pamela (No. 3013).

← No. 3105 Rice Pudding a la Bagration Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3107 Saxony Pudding—Souffled →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a banquet-scale moulded rice pudding from Ranhofer's Delmonico kitchen: five moulds, filled and poached in a water bath, then unmoulded and sauced. Everything about it assumes a brigade, so read the quantities before you begin.

Scale it down firstA pound of rice, two quarts of dairy, fifteen to eighteen yolks and twenty ounces of candied fruit fills five moulds and serves a large party. Quartering the recipe gives roughly one mould of about a quart and a half: 4 oz rice, 1 pint milk-and-cream, 1½ oz sugar, 4-5 yolks, 3-4 whites, 5 oz candied fruit.
"Slack oven"A slack or cool oven; in modern terms somewhere around 300F, though the term was never a measured one. The pudding is poached, not baked: the water bath and the low heat are what keep the yolks from curdling into scrambled egg.
Blanching the riceBlanching means a brief boil in plain water, drained, before the rice goes into the milk. It washes off surface starch and removes any rawness, so the pudding sets creamy rather than gluey. Use a short-grain rice such as arborio or a pudding rice.
Cool before the yolks"When almost cold" is the hinge. Yolks beaten into hot rice will scramble at once. Let the mixture drop to about body temperature, then beat them in one at a time as directed.
Fewer whites than yolksThe recipe calls for fifteen to eighteen yolks but only twelve to fourteen whites. The extra yolks enrich and set the custard; the whites are there for lift. Fold them in with a light hand at the very end.
Buttered and floured mouldsButter thoroughly, dust with flour, and knock out the excess. A charlotte mould or plain deep tin works; the water in the pan should come halfway up the sides and stay hot but never boil.
Candied fruitThe recipe specifies candied fruits cut in quarter-inch dice, so proper glacé fruit rather than small chopped peel; citron, orange peel, cherries and angelica would all suit. Toss the dice in a little flour so they do not sink.
The saucesBoth are cross-references: apricot and kirsch sauce at No. 3001, and Bischoff sauce under fried cream Pamela at No. 3013. The first is presumably sieved apricot let down with kirsch; Bischoff takes its name from the Bishop punch idiom of sweetened wine with orange and spice. A good apricot-kirsch sauce alone will carry the dish.
UnmouldingRest the pudding five to ten minutes out of the water bath before turning it out. Straight from the oven it is too fragile; fully cold it sticks.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house's working repertoire written out at restaurant scale — hence five moulds at a stroke. A moulded, egg-enriched rice pudding poached in a bain-marie belongs to the French entremets tradition rather than to the nursery-dish rice pudding of English and American homes: the rice here is a binder for what is really a custard, stiffened with whipped whites and studded with glacé fruit in the manner of a diplomate. Candied fruit in this quantity signalled expense, since imported citron, angelica and glacé cherries were luxury goods, and the two accompanying sauces — one fruit, one spirituous — are typical of the period's habit of sending a hot pudding to table with a sauce-boat alongside as well as a coating.