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Compote of Rice and Apples
(Northern France.) Boil 1/2 pint rice with 1 quart of water 20 minutes, drain it, add 2 ounces sugar, 2 ounces butter, and rind of a lemon. Stir, cool, and strain it, pressing out all the water. Arrange in layers on a dish with 5 large apples, pared, sliced, and cooked in syrup, between. Put a layer of rice on top, dust with sugar, and bake 1 hour. Arrange with a custard poured over, flavored with wine, called "sabayon." It can be served cold or hot.
A rice-and-apple charlotte of the kind still sold by the slice in Norman bakeries. The original assumes you know what a moderate oven is and how to make a sabayon; both need filling in.
- The rice measureHalf a pint is one cup of raw rice, cooked in a quart of water. Twenty minutes in that much water gives soft, swollen grains rather than separate ones, which is what you want for layering.
- "Strain it, pressing out all the water"This means draining the sweetened, buttered rice firmly in a sieve so the finished layers hold their shape. Do not push the rice through the mesh. Fish out the strip of lemon rind at this stage.
- Lemon rindTake it off in wide strips with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, so it can be removed whole. Grated zest cannot be retrieved and turns bitter over an hour in the oven.
- Apples cooked in syrupPoach the slices in a light sugar syrup only until translucent at the edges and still holding together. Fully collapsed apple will weep into the rice and slacken the whole dish. Use a firm cooking apple.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated hour; the dish is already cooked through, so the baking is only to set and lightly colour it. Butter the dish well and stand it on a tray.
- The sabayonEgg yolks, sugar and sweet wine whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foaming, then poured over. It must not be allowed to boil, or the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks. Best made shortly before serving, as it will slacken on standing.
- YieldRoughly six to eight servings. Hot, it is a pudding; cold, it slices more cleanly and eats like a cake.
Rice puddings baked with fruit belong to northern French home cooking, where dairy and orchard apples were both cheap and rice, imported and cheap by the late nineteenth century, had become an everyday starch rather than a luxury. The layered construction is close to what French cookery books call a gateau de riz aux pommes, and the same idea, firm sweetened rice moulded around cooked apple, underlies apple-and-rice tarts. The sauce is the Italian zabaglione in its French spelling, sabayon. The recipe's parenthetical "(Northern France.)" is the format of the book, a collection of dishes presented region by region.