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Apples with Rice
Prepare the same quantity of rice as for old-fashioned rice pudding; but when removing the pan from the fire only add two eggs. Dress your rice nicely on a dish, lay the apples on top and serve.
This is a fragment that assumes two other recipes on the surrounding pages: an old-fashioned rice pudding and a dish of cooked apples. Read it as an assembly instruction rather than a standalone method.
- What the base should beThe quantity is not given here; it depends on the old-fashioned rice pudding recipe elsewhere in the book. Such puddings are generally rice simmered slowly in sweetened milk until thick and creamy. The result should mound softly on a plate, not pour.
- The eggs are the hingeThey go in off the heat, as the recipe specifies. It is safest to temper them: beat them, stir in a ladle of the hot rice, then return the mixture to the pan. Added straight to a boiling pan they are liable to scramble.
- Two eggs, not the pudding's full complementThe instruction to 'only add two eggs' implies the companion pudding used more. Here the rice stays on the stove, so the eggs only need to enrich and lightly thicken it.
- The applesNo preparation is given; the recipe assumes cooked apples are already to hand. Apples for such a dish would usually be peeled, cored, halved or quartered and poached in syrup, or baked whole, so they hold their shape. Applesauce defeats the point, which is contrast of shape and texture.
- Dressing the dish'Dress your rice nicely' points to arranging it neatly, most simply mounded in a dome, before laying the apples on top. An apricot glaze over the fruit was a common finish on French fruit desserts of the period, though this recipe does not call for one.
Rice cooked in sweetened milk and topped with poached fruit is a standard nineteenth-century French dessert form: a molded creamy rice with fruit arranged over it, of which the version with apples is the plainest and cheapest. The terseness of the entry is itself informative. The dish needed no explanation, only a line telling the cook which of two rice preparations to use, on the assumption that whoever was reading had already made the rice pudding on an earlier page and had a pan of stewed apples somewhere on the range.