No. 3703

Arabian Racahout

Racahout des Arabes

Put a pint of milk into either a silver or tin saucepan. Place in a bowl two level spoonfuls of racahout, then four or five spoonfuls of cold milk; dissolve the racahout and pour it into the boiling milk; let cook for four or five minutes, stirring all the while, sweeten to taste and serve. It can also be prepared with water instead of milk.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A hot milk drink built on a commercial powder that has all but disappeared from Western shops. Everything here depends on slaking that powder properly before it meets hot milk.

The hinge: slake firstRacahout is starch-based, so it must be dispersed in cold milk to a smooth slurry before going into the hot pan. Tipping dry powder into boiling milk gives you lumps that no amount of stirring will undo.
What racahout isA sweetened blend sold in tins through the nineteenth century, typically some combination of salep (powdered orchid tuber), acorn or rice starch, arrowroot, cocoa, sugar and vanilla. Turkish and Middle Eastern groceries still sell salep-based drink mixes that behave the same way; plain salep powder, cocoa and sugar will get you close.
Salep and wild orchidsGenuine salep comes from wild orchid tubers, and their collection and export from Turkey is now restricted, which is why many "salep" mixes sold today are largely starch and flavouring. Treat the labelled mix as the practical ingredient.
Two level spoonfulsRanhofer does not say which spoon. For a pint of milk, two level tablespoons of a starch-rich powder is the sensible reading; a teaspoon's worth would barely thicken it.
Silver or tin saucepanPresumably the aim was a non-reactive, thin-walled pan that heats and cools fast. Any modern stainless or enamelled pan does the job at least as well; avoid bare aluminium or unlined copper.
Heat controlBring the milk only to a bare simmer and keep it moving. Milk with starch in it scorches on the bottom quickly, and four to five minutes at a full boil will both catch and boil over.
Why cook it at allThe four or five minutes are to gelatinise the starch and cook out any raw, chalky taste. It should coat the spoon lightly, like thin drinking chocolate.
YieldA pint makes two generous cups or three small ones. Made with water instead of milk, as the recipe allows, it is noticeably thinner and more austere.

A Little History

Racahout des Arabes was one of the great proprietary "health foods" of the nineteenth century, a tinned powder marketed in France and then across Europe and America as a nourishing drink for children, invalids and convalescents. The name gestures at an Arabic original, and the drink's ancestor is generally traced to the salep beverages of the Levant and Ottoman lands, where powdered orchid tuber thickened hot milk into something between a drink and a gruel; European manufacturers padded the mixture out with starch, sugar, cocoa and vanilla and sold it on the strength of the exotic label. Its appearance in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), tucked among coffee, tea and the end-of-meal odds and ends, shows how thoroughly a branded tin had become part of a New York restaurant's beverage repertoire — the chef of Delmonico's assumed his reader could simply buy the stuff and get on with dissolving it.