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Rice Sandwich
Creole rice may be shaped to a circle, in which make a cavity; leave this to stand in a cool place until firm; when so, cut in half, horizontally. Spread peach preserves neatly on lower ring, mask well with syrup. Put on the upper ring and mask well with the syrup.
Put in a cool place until ready to serve; cut V-shape and serve with unflavored cream.
A dessert "sandwich" in the loosest sense: a ring of sweetened rice, split and filled with preserves, served cold in wedges. The recipe assumes you already have Creole rice on hand, which is the one thing it does not tell you.
- Creole riceThe recipe assumes a rice already prepared elsewhere in the book. In this dessert context it appears to mean rice cooked soft in sweetened milk, perhaps with an egg stirred in at the end, then packed into a mold — closer to a firm rice pudding than to a pilaf. (The same name is used elsewhere in the period for savoury rice, so the sweet reading rests on context.) As a workable starting point, cook about 1 cup rice in 4 cups milk with 1/3 cup sugar until it will hold a shape on a spoon; it must be stiff enough to unmold and slice.
- Shaping the ringA ring mold or savarin mold does what the original describes with "a cavity." A cake pan with a small bowl set in the middle works too. Press the hot rice in firmly to eliminate air pockets, or it will crumble when you cut it horizontally.
- "Leave in a cool place until firm"Written before household mechanical refrigeration was general; a cellar or icebox was the cold storage available. Chill at least 4 hours, preferably overnight; the starch (and any egg in the rice) needs time to set or the horizontal cut will tear.
- Cutting it in halfUse a long thin blade and cut with a sawing motion, or run a length of unwaxed dental floss through it as you would a layer cake. Slide the top ring off on a cake board or a wide spatula.
- "Mask well with the syrup"Masking means coating the surface so it is hidden. Drain the syrup from the peach preserves and spoon it over both the filling and the assembled top; if the preserves are thick and dry, thin a few spoonfuls with water and a little sugar and reduce briefly.
- Unflavored creamPlain heavy cream, poured, not whipped and not sweetened — the point is that the preserves supply all the sugar and flavor. Modern ultra-pasteurized cream is fine here since it is not being whipped.
- Cutting V-shape and yieldCut the ring into V wedges from the outside edge inward. The recipe gives no mold size or yield; a mid-sized ring will give roughly eight to ten wedges. Cut just before serving; the exposed rice dries at the edges.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to a moment when "sandwich" was expanding well past bread and butter — the book stretches the word to cover anything built in layers, including this rice-and-preserve construction that would today simply be called a molded dessert. Sweetened rice molds were a fixture of American and English dessert tables from the mid-nineteenth century, valued because rice, milk and sugar were cheap, kept well, and could be prepared a day ahead in a kitchen with no reliable cold storage beyond a cellar or an icebox. The name "Creole rice" is often said to have attached loosely to rice cooked in milk with eggs and sugar, and, as with much period use of "Creole," it seems to have signaled New Orleans and its rice trade more than any single documented Louisiana recipe. Peach preserves as the filling reflects the era's well-stocked home canning shelf, where put-up fruit was the standard sweet at any season.