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Tartlets, Valencienne
Prepare six tartlet crusts. Place four ounces raw rice in a saucepan with four ounces sugar, one pint milk, one teaspoon vanilla essence and a half saltspoon Spanish saffron. Mix well and let boil for forty-five minutes, occasionally stirring at bottom with wooden spoon to prevent burning. Remove, add six candied cherries cut in quarters, two ounces angelica cut in small squares, one egg yolk and a half gill thick cream. Sharply mix two minutes, divide the rice into the six tartlets evenly, dredge a little powdered sugar over, set to bake in oven five minutes, remove and serve.
A saffron rice pudding baked in pastry shells, sweet but drier than a custard tart. The one thing to get right is the rice: it must cook to complete softness in the milk before anything else goes in, or the filling stays gritty under its sugar crust.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so half of one is roughly 1/8 teaspoon of saffron threads — generous but not absurd for six tartlets. A gill is half a cup, making the "half gill" of cream 1/4 cup.
- Rice by weightFour ounces of raw rice is a scant 2/3 cup. Use a short- or medium-grain rice; long-grain will not break down into the creamy mass the method assumes.
- "Let boil" means simmerForty-five minutes at a true boil will scorch the milk and boil it dry. Hold it at the barest simmer, stir often across the bottom, and have extra warm milk ready — a pint rarely carries this quantity of rice all the way to tender.
- Off the heat before the yolkThe yolk and cream go in after the pan leaves the burner, and the two minutes of sharp mixing is what keeps the yolk from scrambling. The brief bake sets it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the shells and filling are already cooked; five minutes only glazes the sugar. A hot oven, 400–425F, or a few moments under the broiler with close watching.
- Tartlet crustsBlind-bake the six shells fully before filling. The recipe gives no size; judge the shells by the filling, which divides into six fairly generous portions.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once a standard confectioner's green, is now a specialty item. Candied citron or candied lemon peel can stand in, though the green colour against the cherries is lost.
- YieldSix tartlets, one per person, best eaten the day they are made — the rice firms considerably once cold.
Valencienne, in the French kitchen vocabulary this book draws on, is generally taken as shorthand for rice: dishes so labelled are conventionally said to point to Valencia, the Spanish rice-growing region, though the convention is a loose culinary one rather than a documented rule, and the classical garnish so named is usually savoury rice. The saffron here reinforces the reference. The pairing of rice, milk, sugar and saffron is much older than the French naming convention, running back through medieval European sweet rice dishes in which saffron supplied both colour and prestige. Turning a nursery pudding into a garnished tartlet is exactly the sort of promotion that an ambitious pastry station specialised in.