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Rice Cakes, Chantilly
Thoroughly wash and drain on a sieve four ounces rice, then place in an enamelled saucepan with a pint milk, saltspoon salt, half a vanilla bean, and let gently boil for forty-five minutes, lightly mixing at bottom with wooden spoon once in a while. Remove to table, add two ounces sugar, half gill cream, a whole egg, the yolk of another, and sharply stir until well amalgamated. Remove the vanilla bean, wipe and place it in sugar. Roll out on a lightly floured table six ounces feuilletage, and with it line bottom of a pie plate, press down paste at bottom and all round edges, then trim. Line inside with a lightly buttered paper, fill up with dried beans, set in oven for twenty minutes, remove, take up beans and paper, pour rice into plate, neatly smooth surface, set in oven for twenty-five minutes, remove and let rest ten minutes. Beat up a gill cream to stiff froth, add an ounce powdered sugar, six drops vanilla essence, beat up for a minute longer, neatly spread on rice, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over, dress cake on dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A rice pudding tart in a puff-pastry shell, finished with sweetened whipped cream. The measures are the ounce-and-gill system of the pre-war professional kitchen; the technique is straightforward once they are translated.
- The measuresFour ounces rice is a generous half cup; six ounces feuilletage is roughly 170 g. A gill is half a cup, so "half gill cream" is 4 tablespoons and the gill for whipping is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- FeuilletageThis is simply puff paste. A sheet of all-butter frozen puff pastry does the job; it is blind-baked here rather than allowed to rise freely, so the pressing-down at the bottom matters.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, suits puff paste; treat the twenty-minute blind bake and the twenty-five-minute finish as approximate and go by the look of the pastry and the set of the rice.
- The hinge: cool the rice before the eggsThe rice comes off the heat still boiling, and although the sugar and half gill of cream go in first and cool it somewhat, the whole egg and extra yolk follow immediately. Let it stand two or three minutes and stir hard as the recipe says, or the egg can scramble into threads through the pudding.
- Forty-five minutes is not a mistakeLong, slow milk cooking is what gives the rice its creamy body. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat low, and stir the bottom often; milk and rice scorch readily and the burnt taste carries through the whole tart.
- The vanilla beanHalf a bean infuses the milk; the instruction to wipe it and place it in sugar is thrift, giving vanilla sugar for later use. The six drops of essence in the cream amount to well under a quarter teaspoon of extract -- a scant 1/8 teaspoon at most.
- Baking beansThe buttered paper and dried beans are ordinary blind-baking. Parchment and ceramic weights or the same dried beans work identically, and the beans can be kept and reused many times.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no plate size; six ounces of paste and this quantity of rice suit a tart plate of roughly 8 or 9 inches. The whipped cream goes on after the ten-minute rest and the tart is best served the same day; the pastry softens under the rice overnight.
Anything called Chantilly in a French kitchen vocabulary means sweetened whipped cream, the name generally traced to the château of Chantilly north of Paris and its association with grand seventeenth- and eighteenth-century service, though the link is traditional rather than documented. The dish itself is a piece of everyday economy dressed for the table: rice boiled in milk, enriched with egg and cream and set in a puff-pastry shell so that it can be carried in on a folded napkin. The folded napkin is a period marker of hotel and restaurant plating, used to absorb moisture and to raise the item on the dish.