Rice Shape.
Put a teacupful of well-washed Carolina rice on the fire with 1 qt. of milk to come to the boil, lid on the pan. Then draw the pan to the side of the fire to stay there till the rice is soft (2 or 3 hours), lid still on. Add a teacupful of warm milk from time to time if the rice, in swelling, dries.
Flavour with a little pounded vanilla in castor sugar, added when you draw the rice to the side of the fire; if you have no vanilla, put in the rind of a fresh lemon, you take it out before moulding the rice, and stir in 4 ozs. of sugar to melt and mix; but use no lemon if you use vanilla.
Rinse out a basin or a mould in cold water. Give the rice a stir round before you put it in, you can use small moulds for a party, as more “dressy.” Put the hot rice in quickly, pressing it in with a spoon. Put mould into a stewpan with hot water, if you want to keep it warm, or if in summer put the mould into ice till wanted; you can use hollow moulds with apricots or stewed Elvas plums in centre, if liked.
When you turn out the rice, warm a cutter, and with it make a hole in the top of the rice, and put apricot jam or damson jelly as a finish. Hand plain cream for sauce, or failing that, a custard.
Rice Volcano. (R. M. Beverley.)
Take 6 ozs. of well-washed Carolina rice and a stick of vanilla 2 ins. long, and boil both together in milk for ¾ hour—put in but little milk at first, but add more by degrees as fast as it dries —stir with a wooden spoon the whole time; it must not be left unstirred for half a minute, nor must it boil violently; the goodness of the pudding depends upon your attention to these two points.
At the end of the ¾ hour the milk should have dried up, at any rate the rice should not be sloshy.
Now it is time to stir in a small piece of butter and some lumps of white sugar; stir on till the sugar and butter have melted and blended, then take out the vanilla stick, put a jam pot on a dish, pour rice all round (not over) the pot, smoothing it with a spoon into a comely appearance, giving it as much as may be the appearance of the cone of a volcano.
When the rice is nearly cold remove the pot very carefully so as not to disturb the rice. Put preserved apricots with their syrup into the hollow left by the cup in the rice, and then pour over the whole a flood of rich custard or plain cream.
If you like, ornament the dish with macaroons.
(Apricot jam will not do for this dish—the fruit must be whole.)
Rice Wall.
Put a teacupful of well-washed Carolina rice into a stewpan with cold water to cover it, put it on the fire and let it come to the boil, then strain the water from the rice, add 1 pt. of milk to the rice, then put the stewpan at a further distance from the fire and let it simmer, with a small piece of cinnamon and the rind of a lemon, no sugar.
After it has simmered for 2 hours it will require about another pt. of milk put in gradually. Then let it boil for 10 minutes, stirring all the time; a tablespoonful of sugar is added merely to boil up or it makes the mixture scorch; by this time the rice should be well cooked and quite stiff; put the rice into a mould just rinsed out in cold water and not dried. If in summer, bury the mould in ice. At dinner-time turn out, and serve with any kind of stewed fruit. This can be eaten either hot or cold.