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Rice Tart
(Torta di riso) Milk, one quart.
Rice, seven ounces.
Sugar, five and a half ounces.
Sweet almonds with four bitter ones, three and a half ounces.
Candied cedar (angelica), one ounce.
Three whole eggs.
Five egg-yolks.
Taste of lemon peel.
A pinch of salt.
Skin the almonds and grind or pound them with two tablespoonfuls of the sugar.
Cut the candied cedar in very small cubes.
Cook the rice in the milk until it is quite firm, put in all the ingredients except the eggs, which are added when the mixture is cold. Put the entire mixture in a baking tin greased with butter and sprinkled with bread crumbs ground fine, harden in the oven and after 24 hours cut the tart into diamonds. When serving dust with powdered sugar. 200
The problem here is a single line in the ingredient list, and it cannot be worked around by adjusting technique.
- The four bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened. Unprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and are restricted in a number of other countries. Four almonds spread through a whole tart is a small dose by historical standards, but this is not an ingredient to source or swap casually; use a current recipe for rice tart instead.
- Grinding makes it worse, not betterGrinding matters -- The cyanide risk in bitter almonds rises when cell walls are broken and the enzymes meet water. Here the almonds are pounded dry with sugar and then stirred into the cooked rice and milk. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile and baking drives off much of what forms, but it cannot be relied on to remove all of it.
- Custard held at room temperatureStanding for 24 hours -- Separately from the almonds, the mixture is baked until firm and then left to stand for a full day before cutting. Nothing in the text specifies refrigeration, and a baked egg-and-dairy cake held that long at room temperature sits outside modern guidance, though what is resting is a dry keeping cake rather than a soft custard.
- "Harden in the oven" gives no temperatureThere is no heat setting and no time. A custard-set tart needs a known moderate oven and a test for doneness; this instruction cannot be followed as an actual baking direction.
- On the ingredient names, for reading purposes"Candied cedar" is candied citron — Italian cedro — not angelica; the parenthesis in the English edition is a mistranslation. The trailing "200" is not a quantity but a stray number from the source page.
Torta di riso belongs to a family of Italian baked rice sweets found across Emilia and Tuscany, usually a firm milk-cooked rice enriched with eggs, sugar, almonds and candied peel, baked flat in a tin and cut into diamonds or lozenges rather than wedges — a keeping cake sold by the slice rather than a dessert served warm. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) is often said to have drawn much of its material from Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, and its clipped ingredient lists are consistent with that lineage. The small measure of bitter almonds is characteristic of nineteenth-century European baking, where a few were added to sweet almonds for the marzipan-like aroma now supplied by almond extract; the practice was ordinary then and is not permitted now.