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Rice, with Strawberry Sauce
If it is desired to have a dainty but simple dessert with strawberry sauce, nothing will be found better than boiled rice. The rice should be boiled until it becomes glutinous. Some like it served cold, in which case it should be packed in a mold and set away to become chilled. The sauce in that case should be liquid and made as follows: Butter, size of an egg, one-half pound of sugar, two eggs. Beat sugar into the well beaten eggs; add that which has been creamed and a cupful of hot milk or cream. This will cook the eggs a trifle. When it is cool, beat in a pint of crushed strawberries. Should the rice be served hot, the strawberry sauce may be made thus: Two cupfuls of sugar and one-half cupful of butter beaten to a cream together, one quart of strawberries well mashed, and all stirred well into the butter and sugar. This is much richer by having it practically a hard sauce with strawberries in it.
Two sauces are given here, one for cold molded rice and one for hot. The cold-rice sauce is the problem: it is a custard that the author admits is only cooked "a trifle."
- The uncooked custardTwo whole eggs beaten with sugar and slackened with a single cupful of hot milk will not reach anything near 160F, and the large mass of sugar further buffers the eggs against heat. Nothing in the method brings the eggs to a safe temperature, and the sauce is then cooled and held with fresh fruit stirred in. A current recipe for a cooked custard or fruit sauce should be used instead.
- Why the period wording misleads"This will cook the eggs a trifle" is not a statement that the eggs are cooked, and it should not be read as one.
- Butter, size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. "That which has been creamed" refers back to this butter, beaten smooth before it goes into the egg and sugar.
- Half a pound of sugarRoughly 1⅛ cups granulated. This is a very sweet sauce by modern standards.
- The hot-rice sauceThe second sauce, two cups sugar and half a cup butter creamed with a quart of mashed strawberries, contains no egg and is essentially a hard sauce. It melts on contact with hot rice, which is the whole point of it.
- Glutinous riceThe instruction means boiled well past tender until the grains break down and cling, as in a rice pudding base. A short or medium grain rice does this readily; long grain and parboiled rice resist it.
- Molding the cold riceRice packed into a mold sets by starch retrogradation as it chills, and it firms considerably overnight. Rinse the mold with cold water first and turn it out onto a chilled plate.
This is a fruit-sauce note rather than a formal recipe, of the sort that filled the dessert chapters of American household books around 1900: boiled rice was cheap, endlessly available, and treated as a neutral base for whatever the season offered. Strawberries were the first real fruit of the year in most of the country and were eaten hard and fast during a short local season. The two sauces here mark a genuine period distinction between a "liquid" sauce, meaning a thin boiled or scalded custard poured around a cold molded dessert, and a "hard" sauce, meaning creamed butter and sugar meant to melt over something hot. Hard sauce is generally traced to British puddings and survives mainly with steamed and Christmas puddings; the fruited version in this entry shows how freely the technique was borrowed for whatever was ripe.