No. 3322

Rice Cakes

Gateaux au Riz

Line a few oval-shaped timbale molds, the size of the mold shown in No. 1, Fig. 137, with puff paste parings (No. 146); cover the bottoms with apricot marmalade (No. 3675) and fill up with a mellow rice cooked with cream (No. 160) and flavored with vanilla, finishing it with a few egg-yolks; on each place a little butter; push the cakes into the oven, and when done unmold and mask them over with a layer of apricot marmalade, or powder with icing-sugar.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in shorthand for a professional brigade, leaning on numbered cross-references for the paste, the rice and the marmalade. The dish is a rice pudding baked in a pastry case, and it stands or falls on how thick the rice is before it goes into the mold.

The hinge: cook the rice down hardThe rice must be thick enough to hold a shape on the spoon before the yolks go in — Ranhofer's "mellow rice cooked with cream" means short-grain rice simmered slowly in sweetened milk or cream with vanilla until it is almost a paste, not a loose pudding. Slack rice will soak the pastry and slump when unmolded.
Egg yolks off the heat"Finishing it with a few egg-yolks" means beating them into the rice once it has come off the fire and cooled a little, as a binder; stirred into boiling rice they will scramble. Ranhofer gives no proportion.
Timbale moldsOval dariole or timbale molds; Ranhofer points to a size illustrated at No. 1, Fig. 137 but gives no capacity, and states no yield. Butter them well and line with thin pastry.
Puff paste paringsParings are the trimmings left from cutting other pastry — stacked, not balled up, and rolled out again. They puff unevenly, which is exactly why they were used for linings rather than vol-au-vents. Ordinary rough puff or all-butter puff trimmings do the same job.
Apricot marmaladeNot citrus marmalade. In this book it is a thick apricot purée-preserve; apricot jam sieved and boiled down for a few minutes until it sheets on a spoon is the modern equivalent, and it is also what the finishing glaze should be.
Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book specifies no oven heat here. Puff paste needs a hot start to set, so a hot oven dropped to moderate once the pastry has set is a reasonable modern approach, baking until the rice is set and lightly coloured on top.
The butter on topThe dab of butter on each cake would help keep the exposed rice from drying to a skin as it bakes; the recipe calls for it on each cake whichever finish is used.
Unmolding and servingLet them settle briefly in the mold before turning out; straight from the oven they are fragile. Serve warm, glazed with apricot or dusted with icing sugar, as an entremets — the recipe is filed among the small cakes for entremets.

A Little History

Gâteaux au riz belong to the large French repertoire of pastries built on riz au lait, the sweetened milk rice that appears in nineteenth-century kitchens as pudding, as timbale filling and as the body of moulded cold entremets such as riz à l'impératrice. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), places this among the small cakes for entremets — the sweet course served after the roast, when a plain rice pudding would be out of place but a rice pudding in a puff-paste shell is not. The recipe's economy is worth noting: it is built almost entirely from things a working pastry kitchen already had on hand, puff paste and vanilla-scented rice, with apricot marmalade doing the work of both filling and finish. Apricot glaze was a common pastry finish of the period, valued because it sets bright, keeps a cake from drying, and takes to almost any fruit or nut trim laid on top of it.