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Rice with Raisins
Thoroughly wash and drain four ounces Carolina rice, then place in enamelled saucepan with a pint milk, three ounces sugar, a vanilla "stick," the rind of a quarter of sound lemon and a saltspoon salt. Lightly mix and let gently boil for forty minutes, add three ounces California seeded raisins, mix well and cook for fifteen minutes longer, remove to a table, lift up vanilla and rind. (Wipe former and place it in the sugar.) Whisk up a gill of cream to a froth in bowl, add to rice and raisins, mix well, dress rice, etc., on a deep dish and serve.
A stovetop rice pudding, unbaked and enriched with whipped cream at the end. The measurements are by weight, as was normal in professional kitchens of the period.
- The hinge: gentle heatFifty-five minutes of simmering milk on the stove will scorch on the bottom the moment the heat creeps up. Use the lowest steady flame, a heavy pan, and stir often, scraping the base.
- Weights to volumeFour ounces rice is a generous 1/2 cup; three ounces sugar is about 6 tablespoons; three ounces raisins about 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon.
- Pint and gillA US pint of milk is 2 cups. A gill is half a cup of cream, which whips to about a cup of froth.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, the American export standard of the era. Any long-grain white rice works; do not substitute parboiled or converted rice, which will not soften into the creamy mass the dish depends on.
- Milk quantityTwo cups of milk to half a cup of rice is tight for nearly an hour of simmering. Keep more warm milk at hand and add it as the pudding thickens, or it will dry out before the rice is tender.
- The vanilla "stick"A whole vanilla bean, split or not. Filippini's instruction to wipe it and bury it in the sugar jar is still the right economy — a used bean will perfume sugar for months.
- Lemon rindPare it thin with no white pith, and take it out with the vanilla; left in, it turns bitter.
- Seeded raisins"seeded" meant the seeds had been taken out, by hand or by the seeding machinery then coming into use; cookbooks of the period still thought it worth specifying. Modern seedless raisins are the nearest practical substitute.
- Finishing and yieldLet the rice cool to warm before folding in the whipped cream, or the cream will simply melt into it. Serves four as written.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book around dishes he could label by nation, and stovetop rice-and-milk puddings belong to nearly all of them — French riz au lait, Spanish arroz con leche, Italian riso al latte. What dates this particular version is the shopping list: "Carolina rice" by this date was largely a generic name for long-grain rice, much of it grown in Louisiana and Texas, while "California seeded raisins" were a branded American commodity by the turn of the twentieth century, the product of the young San Joaquin Valley vineyards whose growers had turned to drying grapes. Seeding raisins by machine was recent enough that cookbooks still specified it, and the direction to wipe the spent vanilla bean and store it in the sugar reflects a time when a single bean was worth keeping.