No. 3544

Cauliflower with Marchioness Rice

Choux-fleurs au Riz Marquise

Blanch half a pound of rice; cook it in milk for half an hour, pass through a fine sieve and mix with it double as much hazel-nut ice cream (No. 3464). Fill a cauliflower-form mold with three pints of this preparation, keeping a cavity in the center, and fill this with the well-cooked boiled rice marinated in vanilla syrup and having added to it a salpicon of fresh fruits, macaroons and lady fingers steeped in maraschino. Close the mold after it is quite full, pack in salted ice and freeze for one hour, then unmold on a folded napkin and serve with a separate sauce-boatful of sauce prepared with vanilla ice (No. 3458) and maraschino mixed together, to which add an equal volume of whipped cream (No. 50).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a molded ice cream bombe, not a vegetable dish: the cauliflower is the shape of the mold, and the "florets" are the hazelnut rice mixture set against the fruited rice core. Nothing about it needs the range beyond half an hour of gentle rice cooking.

There is no cauliflower in itChoux-fleurs au riz marquise names the mold, cast in the form of a cauliflower head and closing over the filling. Any two-part bombe or melon mold of about three pints will do; a metal pudding basin lined and capped with a flat lid works if you accept a plain dome.
Quantities and unitsHalf a pound of rice is a scant cup and a quarter of raw short-grain rice. Three pints is six cups of frozen mixture, which serves ten to twelve as a dessert. "Double as much" hazelnut ice cream most likely means twice the quantity of the sieved rice pulp, though the original does not say whether that is measured by volume or by weight.
Blanch the riceIn Ranhofer's usage this means dropping the rice into boiling water for a few minutes and draining it, to wash off surface starch and any raw taste before the milk cooking. Omit it and the finished puree is liable to be stickier.
The hinge: sieve while hot, chill before combiningThe milk-cooked rice passes the sieve most easily while still warm, and is best thoroughly cold before it meets the ice cream, or the base softens and the mixture can freeze grainy. A food mill or fine drum sieve does what the original expects; a blender gives a stretchy paste.
Cross-referenced componentsNo. 3464 is hazelnut ice cream, No. 3458 vanilla, and No. 50 whipped cream. Good commercial hazelnut gelato and vanilla ice cream substitute honestly here. The sauce is simply softened vanilla ice cream loosened with maraschino and folded with an equal volume of whipped cream, served cold in a boat.
SalpiconA salpicon is a fine, even dice. Cut the fresh fruit small enough to spoon, break the macaroons and lady fingers into pieces of the same size, and moisten them with maraschino rather than soaking them to mush.
Freezing without a salt-ice packAn hour buried in ice and coarse salt brings the mold well below freezing point. A domestic freezer needs four to six hours for a three-pint mold, and the mixture should be nearly frozen when it goes in. Do not fill the cavity with warm rice.
UnmoldingDip the closed mold in cool water for a few seconds, or wrap it in a hot cloth, then turn it out onto the folded napkin, which is there to absorb meltwater and keep the piece from sliding. Return it to the freezer to firm up if the surface has softened.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a long chapter of frozen dishes molded to look like something else entirely — asparagus bundles, hams, melons, cauliflowers. The conceit was standard high-service pastry work of the period, when hinged pewter bombe molds were in wide use and the pleasure of the dish lay partly in the diner's second look. Rice cooked in milk and sieved into ice cream belongs to the same French repertoire that gave us riz à l'impératrice, and the "marquise" tag was applied loosely in nineteenth-century menus to iced preparations lightened with cream. Maraschino, a sweetened liqueur distilled from marasca cherries and their kernels rather than the syrup the name now suggests, was among the perfumes used for steeped biscuits and fruit.