Home › The World's Kitchen › Riz Au Lait D'Amandes
Riz Au Lait D'Amandes
Plunge two and a half ounces sweet almonds in hot water for five minutes. Drain well, peel and pound in a mortar to a paste; remove and place the paste in a saucepan with a quart and a half cold milk and boil for fifteen minutes, then strain the milk through a cheesecloth into another saucepan; add four ounces well-washed fine rice, two ounces powdered sugar and a teaspoon vanilla essence; briskly stir with a wooden spoon, then slowly cook for fifty minutes, lightly stirring every five minutes. Add then two egg yolks, mix for two minutes, transfer it into a deep dish and serve very hot.
A French rice pudding built on almond milk rather than plain milk — the almonds are infused, then discarded, so the flavour is subtle and the texture entirely from the rice. Two things decide whether it works: gentle heat for the long cook, and restraint when the yolks go in.
- The hinge: the egg yolksTake the pan off the heat before stirring in the yolks, and stir constantly for the full two minutes. Beaten into rice at a simmer they will set into threads of scrambled egg; off the heat, the residual warmth thickens them into the pudding.
- MeasuresA quart and a half is 6 cups (about 1.4 litres) of milk. Four ounces of rice is roughly 2/3 cup of a short or medium grain; 2 ounces of sugar is about 1/4 cup; 2 1/2 ounces of almonds is a scant 1/2 cup.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term usually means granulated sugar ground fine rather than the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar is a safe substitute here.
- Almonds and the mortarThe hot-water plunge loosens the skins; the pounding is only to break the cells so the milk can take up the flavour. A food processor does it in seconds, and blanched almond flour works if you accept a slightly flatter flavour. Do not skip the straining — the pounded solids are what make the pudding gritty.
- StrainingLine a sieve with damp cheesecloth, pour the hot milk through, then gather the cloth and squeeze hard. A good deal of the almond flavour sits in the last of the liquid.
- Fifty minutes of slow cookingUse a heavy-bottomed pan on the lowest workable flame, or a double boiler if your stove will not go low enough. Milk and rice scorch readily, so the five-minute stirring interval is a minimum on a modern burner.
- VanillaUse real vanilla extract. Add it with the rice as written if you like, though the aroma survives better if you stir it in at the end with the yolks.
- Yield and servingServes six generously. It is meant to go to the table very hot in a deep dish; it thickens considerably as it cools, so slacken it with a little warm milk if it stands.
Almond milk was one of the great workhorses of medieval and early modern European kitchens, valued because it kept better than dairy in warm weather and, more importantly, because it was permitted on the many fast days when milk and eggs were not. Rice cooked in it appears across French, English and Italian fast-day cookery for centuries, and the dish survived into the nineteenth-century repertoire as an elegant sweet rather than a penitential one, using both dairy milk and egg yolks, as here. Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, gathered this into The International Cook Book (1906); the phrasing, with its mortar, its wooden spoon and its timings counted to the minute, is the voice of a professional kitchen writing down what it does rather than a household economising on eggs.