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Fresh Peaches with Rice
Thoroughly wash and drain four ounces rice, place in a saucepan with one pint milk, four ounces sugar, one teaspoon vanilla essence and rind of a sound lemon; mix well and gently boil fifty minutes. Remove rind, add one egg yolk and two tablespoons cream; sharply mix while heating one minute. Remove and keep hot.
Carefully peel six good-sized sound sweet peaches, cut in halves, remove stones. Place in a saucepan two ounces sugar, two and a half gills water and two tablespoons maraschino, place on fire, and as soon as it begins to boil drop in peaches and cook five minutes. Dress rice on a dish, place peaches on top. Reduce syrup to half the quantity and pour over the peaches, and serve either hot or cold.
A rice pudding base with poached peaches — the sort of dessert that appeared on hotel menus under a dozen French names. The measurements are Edwardian weights, and the rice needs watching more than the recipe suggests.
- Weights to cupsFour ounces rice is a generous half cup; four ounces sugar is about half a cup; two ounces sugar is a generous quarter cup. Two and a half gills is about a cup and a quarter of water (a gill is four fluid ounces, half a cup).
- The rice will want more liquidA pint of milk to half a cup of rice over fifty minutes is tight, and modern short-grain rice absorbs fast. Keep the heat very low, stir often, and add milk by the splash if it tightens before the grains are soft.
- Use a starchy short grainArborio, Carnaroli or pudding rice give the creamy body the dish depends on. Long-grain rice stays separate and the result reads as leftovers rather than dessert.
- The egg yolk is the hinge"Sharply mix while heating one minute" means temper and thicken without scrambling. Beat the yolk with the cream first, stir it into the rice off the heat, then return it briefly — no boiling once the yolk is in.
- Lemon rindPare it in wide strips with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, and fish every piece out before the yolk goes in, as the recipe directs. Grated zest cannot be removed and can make the pudding bitter over fifty minutes.
- Peeling the peachesFreestone peaches at full ripeness peel with a knife; anything firmer is easier blanched thirty seconds in boiling water and slipped out of its skin. Clingstones will not give up their stones neatly whatever you do.
- Five minutes is for firm fruitRipe peach halves in simmering syrup collapse in two or three minutes. Lift them out as soon as a knife tip slides in, then reduce the syrup — which is what the recipe is really asking for.
- MaraschinoThis means the dry Italian cherry liqueur (Luxardo and similar), not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Kirsch is the closest substitute.
- YieldSix peaches over this quantity of rice serves six. Served cold the pudding stiffens; loosen with a little cream before dishing.
Rice cooked in sweetened milk and crowned with poached fruit was a standard of the late nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire, filed in French kitchens under names like riz à l'impératrice and, when the fruit was peach, borrowing the general shape of the dishes Escoffier's generation built around poached peaches and a base of rice or ice. The International Cook Book — the work of Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York — collected exactly this kind of hotel dessert and set it out in the compressed, one-paragraph style a professional kitchen could read at a glance, which is why the instructions assume you already know how to temper a yolk. Peaches were a summer luxury with a short window, and a dish that could be served "either hot or cold" earned its place on a menu twice over.