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Orange Rice Iced Pudding
Place in quite a large saucepan four ounces raw rice, chopped rind of an orange, one quart milk, five ounces sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence, the strained juice of the orange, mix well and gently boil for fifteen minutes. Dilute six egg yolks with a gill cream, add to rice with a teaspoon orange-flower water and mix well while heating, without boiling, for five minutes. Remove from fire, place pan in a basin with cold water up to half its height and stir until thoroughly cold, pour preparation into an ice-cream freezer, then proceed to freeze same as vanilla ice cream. Place the frozen ice cream in a quart mould, tightly cover, then re-bury it in same tub and let freeze for an hour. Remove, immerse in tepid water for a few seconds, wipe all around, unmould on cold dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A stirred rice custard churned into ice cream and moulded — closer to a frozen riz à l'impératrice than to anything in a modern freezer aisle. The hinge is the custard stage: once the yolks go in, the mixture must never boil or the eggs will curdle and the rice will taste scrambled.
- The custard stageAfter the yolks and cream go in, hold the pan over low heat and stir constantly for the five minutes specified, taking it to about 170–175F on a thermometer. Boiling splits it; the rice already in suspension makes a broken custard almost impossible to rescue.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Use heavy cream; the fat is what keeps the frozen texture from going icy.
- Weights to volumesFour ounces of raw rice is a scant 2/3 cup; five ounces of sugar is about 3/4 cup. Use a short or medium grain white rice, which breaks down into the milk rather than staying separate.
- Vanilla essence and orange-flower waterEssence here means extract, so half a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Orange-flower water is still sold in Middle Eastern groceries and in the baking aisle; it is potent and stale bottles turn soapy, so taste before adding.
- The rindChop or zest only the coloured outer layer, and finely — frozen strips of peel are unpleasant to bite. For a smoother result the cooked rice mixture can be pressed through a sieve before chilling, though the recipe does not call for it.
- CoolingThe cold-water bath and constant stirring are not fussiness: they stop the rice absorbing more liquid unevenly and keep a skin from forming. Chill fully in the refrigerator, several hours or overnight, before churning.
- "An ice-cream freezer" and "same tub"The original assumes a hand-crank churn set in a wooden tub of crushed ice and rock salt. A modern machine churns the base fine; the second stage — packing the filled mould back in ice and salt for an hour — is the ripening step, and a domestic freezer at 0F does the same job.
- UnmouldingA quart metal mould or loaf tin works. A few seconds in tepid water, wiped dry, then turned out; the folded napkin under the pudding was conventional service for moulded ices and absorbs melt.
- YieldAbout a quart, six modest servings. Rice-based ices freeze harder than plain custard, so let it stand five minutes before slicing.
Frozen rice puddings belong to the grand hotel repertoire of the late nineteenth century, when the cold kitchen of a large restaurant could keep ice and salt working all day and a moulded ice was the expected close to a formal dinner. The dish is a first cousin of riz à l'impératrice, the moulded rice-and-custard cream generally traced to French pastry work of the Second Empire, but chilled rather than set with gelatine. The orange-flower water is the period fingerprint: distilled bitter-orange blossom was a standard flavouring in European confectionery long before vanilla became cheap, and it survived longest in exactly this sort of milk-and-rice sweet. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini out of a long career in New York restaurant kitchens, for American households that had begun to own ice-cream freezers but still looked to the hotel dining room for what to put in them.