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Gateau De Riz
(French Rice Pudding.) In France rice pudding for grown people is never liquid and milky, but a firm, handsome affair, garnished with fruit, and served with a wine or custard sauce, on a dish.
Cook 4 ounces rice in 1 quart milk with 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, and rind of a lemon. Simmer till tender and the milk is absorbed. Cool it, add yolks 6 eggs beaten, then the whites beaten stiff, some nutmeg, 2 tablespoonfuls of raisins and chopped citron. Mix well, pour into a buttered mould lined with bread-crumbs, bake 1 hour. Turn out, and serve hot or cold with a soft custard flavored with sherry.
RICE PUDDING (as cooked in Nancy.) Cook 1/2 pound rice, 2 ounces sugar, and 2 ounces butter for 3/4 hour, stirring now and then. Add 1 egg well beaten, then line a buttered mould with this and with layers of cooked apricots between the layers of rice,--preserves will do,--put rice on top and bake 3/4 hour. Turn out and serve hot, with a sauce made of the juice of the fruit, sugar, and vanilla.
Two French rice puddings, both moulded and turned out rather than spooned from a dish. Neither gives an oven temperature, and the second omits its cooking liquid altogether.
- Oven temperatureNeither version gives one. The first is an egg-rich mixture set in a mould, so a moderate oven, 325-350F, suits it; too hot and the egg curdles and the pudding weeps when turned out. The Nancy version, with only one egg, is more forgiving.
- The mouldA plain charlotte mould, pudding basin or one-quart-plus souffle dish. Butter it heavily, then roll fine dry breadcrumbs around the inside; the crumb layer is what lets the pudding release cleanly. A water bath is worth using even though the original does not call for one.
- Missing liquid in the Nancy versionThe second recipe says to cook half a pound of rice with sugar and butter for three quarters of an hour but never names a liquid. Milk is the likely intention, by analogy with the first recipe, but no quantity is given and the original is genuinely incomplete here.
- RiceUse a short or medium grain rice such as Arborio or pudding rice; long grain releases less of the starch that helps bind the moulded shape. Four ounces is a scant two-thirds cup.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced at holiday time. Candied orange or mixed peel substitutes without complaint.
- Folding the eggsCool the rice to lukewarm before the yolks go in or they will scramble in threads. The stiff whites are folded in last and give the pudding enough lift to stand once unmoulded.
- The sherry custardA creme anglaise: yolks, sugar, scalded milk, stirred over low heat to about 175-180F until it coats a spoon, then the sherry off the heat. It must not boil.
- Turning outLet the baked pudding rest ten to fifteen minutes so it firms, run a thin knife around the edge, then invert onto a warmed dish. Straight from the oven it will slump.
- YieldEach version serves six to eight as a dessert.
Gateau de riz -- literally rice cake -- was a familiar nineteenth-century French entremets, and the note that it is "never liquid and milky" is aimed at Anglo-American readers who knew rice pudding chiefly as a nursery dish baked slowly in a shallow dish with a skin on top. The French treatment binds the rice with egg and moulds it so that it can be turned out, sauced and garnished like any other sweet course. The second version is placed in Nancy, in Lorraine, a region long associated with orchard fruit and preserving -- mirabelle plums above all -- though apricots are not particularly a Lorraine crop. The explanatory first sentence, telling the reader what the dish is supposed to look like, suggests a book written for cooks reporting French practice home to an English-speaking audience.