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Apricots with Rice
Wash and drain well one gill best quality rice; place it in a small saucepan with one pint cold milk, one saltspoon salt, three tablespoons powdered sugar, one teaspoon vanilla essence and the rind of a quarter of a sound lemon. Stir well with a wooden spoon. Set the pan on the fire and let slowly cook for fifty minutes, stirring once in a while meantime. Dress the rice on a hot dish.
Open a pint can of apricots, drop them with the liquor into a small saucepan and let come to boiling point. Lift the apricots up with a skimmer, arrange on top of the rice. Pour one tablespoon Swiss kirsch into the liquor of the apricots, boil for ten minutes, then pour the liquor over the apricots and serve.
A stovetop rice pudding served warm under canned apricots and a reduced kirsch syrup. The instructions are sound; only the units and one ingredient name need translating.
- A gill of riceOne gill is half a cup, about 3 1/2 oz of raw rice. With a pint of milk that is a 1:4 ratio, which is right for a loose, spoonable pudding rather than a moulded one.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. It matters here: without it the sugar and vanilla read flat.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" meant finely granulated sugar, closer to today's caster sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar is the safe substitute.
- The rice to use"Best quality rice" in this period usually meant Carolina rice, then the standard table rice. A short or medium grain such as Arborio will release more starch and thicken the milk; long-grain basmati will stay separate and give you a different dish.
- Low heat, and the wooden spoonThis is the hinge. Half a cup of rice in a pint of milk over anything but the lowest flame will scorch on the bottom long before fifty minutes are up. Use a heavy pan, keep it barely trembling, and stir down to the base every few minutes rather than "once in a while."
- Lemon rindTake the rind in a wide pared strip with no pith, and lift it out before serving. Grated zest cannot be retrieved and will turn bitter over fifty minutes of cooking.
- A pint can of apricotsThe nearest modern equivalent is a 15 to 16 oz can of apricot halves in syrup. Fruit packed in juice rather than syrup will give a thinner sauce that needs longer to reduce.
- The kirsch syrupTen minutes of hard boiling on a small quantity of canned syrup risks reducing it well past a pourable sauce. Watch it and stop when it coats the spoon, often three to five minutes. Much of the alcohol boils off, so it reads more as almond and cherry than as spirit.
- YieldThree to four servings as written. Serve it warm, on a warmed dish as the original says, since the pudding stiffens noticeably as it cools.
This belongs to a family of French rice desserts -- riz au lait, and moulded versions such as riz a l'imperatrice -- dressed with poached or preserved fruit, found in hotel and restaurant cooking on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900. The pared lemon rind and vanilla in the milk are standard French kitchen practice, while "Swiss kirsch" points to the cherry brandy of the Swiss and southwest German cherry districts, the distillate also used in fondue. The pint can of apricots suggests a date no earlier than the era of large-scale commercial canning: canned California apricots were widely available by the early 1900s, and a cookbook of this kind could assume a cook would reach for a can rather than wait for a short fresh season -- and could then treat the canning syrup itself as the base of a finished sauce.