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Paradise Ice Cream
Thoroughly wash two ounces raw rice, drain it and place it in a saucepan with pint of milk, two ounces sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence and a tablespoon orange-flower water, lightly mix and let slowly cook fifty minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Press through a sieve into a saucepan. Add six egg yolks, four ounces of sugar and sharply whisk two minutes. Pour in one and a half pints milk and two gills cream, set pan on the fire, and constantly and briskly stir until thoroughly hot, but not boiling. Take from the fire, lay on a table and let cool off. Strain through a Chinese strainer into an ice-cream freezer, as in Vanilla, pour in two tablespoons Jamaica rum, then proceed to freeze and serve same as vanilla.
A rice-thickened custard ice cream, closer to a frozen riz à l'impératrice than to a plain vanilla. The sieving of the cooked rice is what gives it body, so do not skip it.
- The hinge: hot but not boilingStir over moderate heat until thoroughly hot, around 170-175F. With this much milk to six yolks the base stays thin rather than coating a spoon. Pushed hotter it risks curdling, and straining will only partly rescue the texture.
- Gills and other old measuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. Two ounces of raw rice is about a third of a cup; two ounces of sugar is a scant third of a cup, and four ounces is a generous half cup.
- Which riceUse a short or medium grain rice, which breaks down and gives up more starch. A firm long grain such as basmati releases less starch and gives a thinner body, though after fifty minutes in milk it will still sieve.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve lined with a single layer of cheesecloth does the same work.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, but modern bottles vary widely in strength. A tablespoon of a concentrated brand can push the whole batch toward soap; taste the rice mixture after it has cooked and adjust before the yolks go in.
- Vanilla essenceRead as vanilla extract, half a teaspoon.
- The freezerWritten for a hand-crank bucket churn packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the strained base thoroughly, ideally overnight, before churning; a warm base will simply slosh.
- The rumTwo tablespoons of Jamaica rum will also lower the freezing point slightly and help keep the ice cream scoopable. Adding much more will leave you with a base that never sets firm.
- YieldThe two and a half pints of milk, one cup of cream, six yolks and six ounces of sugar come to roughly three pints of base, so expect somewhat under two quarts frozen.
The book is Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, and the recipe carries the marks of the classical kitchen: rice cooked in milk, sieved, enriched with yolks, and perfumed with orange-flower water. Filippini was Italian-born and worked in New York restaurant kitchens, Delmonico's among them. The combination recalls the family of moulded rice creams that were grand-restaurant dessert work, of which riz à l'impératrice — generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century — is the best known, though that dish keeps the rice grains whole and is normally flavoured with kirsch and candied fruit; here the mixture is sent to the ice pail instead of the mould. Orange-flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, was a far more common flavouring in American and European sweet cookery then than it is now, and appears throughout books of this period alongside rose water and almond. The name "Paradise" is the sort of fanciful restaurant label attached to ice creams of the era rather than a dish with a traceable origin; grand hotel menus were full of such coinages.