Of the European- and American-style rice puddings, I always unhesitatingly opt for members of the stovetop branch made without eggs. (Or for that matter, without raisins—I like to put raisins plumped in hot water and a little Scotch on the finished pudding, not in it.) Nothing is wrong with baked egg-enriched rice puddings, but to me they lack the clean elegance of the ones simmered in a saucepan.
The long-grain rice of American supermarkets can be used in a pinch but really is not starchy enough to suit the purpose. The kinds I recommend are called “short-grain” by some people, “medium-grain” by others, and—just to complete the confusion—“round-grain” by many British pudding lovers. They are starchy, but not as starchy as the varieties used for risotto (arborio, vialone nano, etc.). My favorite is baldo rice, which is grown in Italy largely for the Turkish market and shows up in Turkish and Greek groceries. I’ve also had good results with a kind widely sold in Hispanic markets under names like “Valencia” (which it is not) or “Valencia-type.”
The reason for fussing over the choice of rice is that you want it to gradually release a certain amount of starch in cooking—just enough to bind the mass of softened grains in a velvety matrix that conveys a sense of creaminess even when you use skim milk. The other important thing to realize is that as regards the amount of rice you’re using in proportion to liquid, less is more. It’s astonishing how little rice you need for the most beautiful effect. When you use too much, somehow the lovely puddingy consistency never develops to the full and the milk can’t really blossom in your mouth. Some old-fashioned recipes used to specify a few tablespoons of rice to a quart of milk. Other versions, like mine, use both water (for precooking the rice) and milk (for completing the cooking).
The best rice pudding I ever made was a happy accident using the leftover milk from a batch of clotted cream.
YIELD: About 5 to 6 servings
⅔ cup (generous) baldo or other medium-grain rice
1½ cups water
4 cups milk (whole, skim, or any desired percentage)
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
A 4- to 5-inch piece of vanilla bean
Zest of half a lemon, peeled in long strips
Either a 3-inch piece of cinnamon stick or a generous grating of nutmeg
Put the rice and water in a heavy-bottomed 1½- or 2-quart saucepan, bring to a boil, and cook tightly covered over very low heat for 15 minutes. Don’t worry if not all the water is absorbed in that time.
Add the milk and remaining ingredients, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Bring it to a boil, and simmer over medium heat for 45 to 50 minutes, stirring frequently. After about 15 minutes fish out the vanilla bean, slit it lengthwise with a small sharp knife, and scrape out the contents. Return the vanilla bean and seeds to the milk, which will still be very thin. It should begin to thicken slightly in another 15 to 20 minutes. Keep stirring vigilantly as more of the starch dissolves out. The pudding is done when it has a creamy, full-bodied texture.
Remove the vanilla bean, lemon peel, and cinnamon stick (if using). Rice pudding can be served warm, but I prefer to let it cool to room temperature before transferring it to a bowl and chilling thoroughly. Some people dislike having any skin form on top and try to prevent this by pressing plastic wrap directly over the surface. I simply stir it back in a few times and don’t worry if a little more re-forms.
CHOCOLATE PUDDING
This recipe is taken with little alteration from the first chocolate pudding recipe I ever used, in my mother’s copy of Fannie Farmer. It’s a good representative of the cornstarch-based milk pudding tribe, which for a time nearly disappeared from up-to-date cookbooks. Some of us, however, remember that such puddings used to be one of the most popular uses for milk in American cuisine.
Don’t judge this kind of pudding by chocolate mousse standards. The texture, though less airy and creamy than that of a mousse made with beaten egg white and whipped cream, is smooth and satisfying in another way. What happens in cooking is that as the starch molecules link with the water molecules of the hot milk, new compounds form from the softened, reconfigured (“gelatinized”) starch and the no-longer-free water. The butterfat of the milk keeps the mixture from turning into a pasty stodge as it cools to near-solid consistency—at least, as long as the proportion of starch to liquid isn’t high.
Being very lowbrow in my approach to chocolate, I use any brand of plain unsweetened chocolate. If the new high-cacao-solids premium chocolate brands now reaching this country are your passion, by all means experiment with them (reducing the amount of sugar slightly if the chocolate is already sweetened).
YIELD: 4 servings
2 cups whole milk, or part milk, part half-and-half
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, broken into pieces
3 tablespoons cornstarch
⅓ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Whipped cream for garnish
Reserve ¼ cup of the milk. Pour the rest into a small heavy saucepan with the chocolate and heat over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon or heatproof rubber spatula, until the chocolate is melted. (You may prefer to use a double boiler, which will give some insurance against scorching when the pudding starts to thicken.)
While the milk heats, put all the dry ingredients in a small bowl and mix in the reserved ¼ cup milk to make a smooth paste. Stir this into the milk-chocolate mixture, increase the heat slightly, and cook, stirring frequently, until it starts to thicken, 5 to 8 minutes. Stir in the vanilla, reduce the heat slightly, and cook for another 5 minutes, stirring slowly but regularly. (Overly vigorous stirring may break down the starch links.) Remove from the heat, and continue to stir (very gently) as the pudding cools almost to room temperature. Gently pour into 4 small serving dishes, such as glass custard cups; press a piece of plastic wrap over the surface of each to keep a skin from forming. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours, until thoroughly chilled, and serve with a bowl of unsweetened whipped cream.
PANNA COTTA AND RELATIVES
When panna cotta rode into town in the 1990s, people of a certain age did a double take. This maiden-white concoction of gelatin-set sweetened cream (with or without milk) took some of us back to the early ’60s, when the women’s magazines and newspaper food columns periodically urged everybody to try something that went by the name of “Russian” or sometimes “Swedish” cream. These attributions of nationality now sound to me like food editors’ games of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. But the idea behind “Russian” cream was gorgeously simple. It consisted of heavy cream and sour cream in any preferred proportion, with sugar and enough gelatin to make a sort of cream-on-cream aspic. I adored it. The sour cream just redeemed it from insipidity without detracting from the stunning super-hyper-creaminess of the thing. I’ve never cared equally for the blander panna cotta, except when given a little kick with citrus zest or something else by way of contrast.
Where did the whole idea originate? I suspect that panna cotta (“cooked cream”) doesn’t have particularly old Italian roots. Probably it and its cousins elsewhere started as latter-day simplifications of the medieval blancmange, which originally was made like the chicken-breast pudding (tavuk göğsü kazandibi) that is still a beloved dessert in Turkey. After the Middle Ages, blancmange was successively transformed into an almond-milk custard and a starch-bound milk pudding. When commercial isinglass—predecessor to today’s gelatin—appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it gave rise to still other changes on the milk-pudding theme. There was an English version called “stone cream,” which involved a layer of fruit preserves covered with a layer of isinglass-set sweetened cream. (In her 1961 The Continental Flavor, Nika Standen Hazelton passed along an old recipe with the comment “Said to be one of Queen Victoria’s favorites.”) Early in the gelatin era something similar turns up in American cookbooks as “Velvet Cream.” My guess is that modern gelatin manufacturers helped revive th
e general idea from time to time in the twentieth century.
The proportion of cream to milk is entirely up to the individual cook. In Marcella Cucina, Marcella Hazan points out that when a panna cotta mixture made with American gum-stabilized ultrapasteurized cream is allowed to boil, it leaves a strange residue on the pan bottom. Take the pan off the stove just before the cream boils (or look for nonultrapasteurized cream).
YIELD: 6 servings
1 envelope (2¼ teaspoons) unflavored granulated gelatin
1 cup milk
2 cups heavy cream (or half heavy, half light cream), preferably nonultrapasteurized
½ cup sugar (¾ cup if you like it sweet)
A pinch of salt
About ½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (optional)
1 to 2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (optional)
Put the gelatin in a small saucepan with the milk and cream. Add the sugar, salt, and optional lemon zest and juice; heat gently, stirring to dissolve the gelatin and sugar thoroughly. If using ultrapasteurized cream, do not quite let it boil. Otherwise, bring just to a boil and remove from the heat. (Make sure the gelatin is dissolved; if necessary, reheat briefly.) If you wish, pour through a fine-mesh strainer to remove the shreds of lemon zest. Let the mixture cool just slightly.
Have ready six lightly oiled 6-ounce or 4-ounce heatproof glass custard cups. Pour in the mixture and refrigerate until set, 3 to 4 hours. (If keeping longer, cover with plastic wrap; it’s best eaten within a day.) Unmold by briefly dipping the bottom of each cup in hot water, then inverting onto a serving plate. Serve with lightly sweetened fresh fruit or a pureed fruit sauce like raspberry coulis.
VARIATION: For “Russian Cream”—I have grave qualms about the authenticity of the name—omit the milk. Using 1 envelope gelatin, 2 cups heavy cream, and ¾ to 1 cup sugar, heat to (or just under) a boil in the same way. Remove from the heat, and add 2 cups sour cream, stirring it in very thoroughly. Pour or spoon into 8 custard cups or a 5-cup serving bowl and chill for 4 hours. Don’t try to unmold this; it’s too creamy. The perfect foil is an instant sauce made by gently melting about a cup of thin-cut Seville orange marmalade in a small saucepan and adding a shot of Scotch.
CREMETS D’ANGERS
This specialty of the Loire Valley is cream lovers’ heaven, pure and simple: whipped cream napped with plain heavy cream. The whipped cream is brought to an ethereal airiness by being lightened with stiffly beaten egg whites and drained in a mold or wicker basket (often heart-shaped) lined with muslin. You then serve it with summer berries and sugar, “sauced” with unwhipped cream.
There are Angevin versions of cremets based on a very soft, fresh fromage blanc beaten smooth with cream and/or egg whites. Something like this, with a cream-cheese mixture replacing the fromage blanc, is the usual model for the coeur à la crème recipes in American cookbooks, which I find stolid by comparison with the whipped-cream kind described by Curnonsky (in Recettes des Provinces de France) and Elizabeth David (in no less than three of her books—she must have been crazy about it).
This is a dish best reserved for your local summer fruit season, no matter how brief. Since there is no last-minute preparation, it’s an ideal dinner-party dessert. (But the recipe can easily be halved for a smaller number of people.)
Because there is nothing to disguise the essence of cream, I’d try to hunt down glorious heavy cream from a small dairy (preferably one that does batch-pasteurizing without homogenizing) before undertaking this exercise in unvarnished simplicity.
Ultrapasteurized cream just won’t yield the same effect. But if you can find good crème fraîche, a few spoonfuls will add a little pizzazz to ultrapasteurized cream.
Please note the use of uncooked egg whites. The risk of salmonella infections from raw eggs has been greatly reduced in the last twenty years (and is smaller with eggs from free-range hens than birds raised in factory-farm conditions), but it has not been eliminated.
YIELD: About 10 servings
About 3½ cups heavy cream, preferably nonultrapasteurized and unhomogenized
4 egg whites
Superfine sugar
Fresh seasonal fruit (raspberries, very sweet and ripe strawberries, or sliced peaches or apricots)
Using a chilled bowl and chilled beaters, whip 2¼ cups of the cream very stiff (almost to butter stage).
Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks in a separate bowl. Thoroughly fold the egg whites into the cream.
Line a perforated mold (a coeur à la crème mold, if you have one) or colander with tight-woven cheesecloth or a large cotton handkerchief, letting the edges hang over the rim. Spoon the whipped mixture into the mold and loosely cover with the overhang. Set it over a bowl to drain and place the whole arrangement overnight in the refrigerator (which should be free of anything smelly). At serving time, turn out the cremets into a dish. Pass around the cremets, sugar, fruit, and remaining unwhipped cream for everyone to help himself. Or you can pour the cream directly over the serving bowl of cremets.
VARIATION: Recently I was introduced to a very similar dish called “Fontainebleau,” or “Fromage de Fontainebleau,” in a surprising but delicious Americanized version using both sugar and yogurt. Begin by stirring together 2 cups plain yogurt (preferably a rich, creamy kind) and 1 cup superfine sugar until the sugar is well dissolved. Whip 2 cups heavy cream; separately beat 3 egg whites. Fold together cream, egg whites, and sweetened yogurt; drain as described above and serve with fresh fruit and (if desired) fresh cream.
LEMON SPONGE PUDDING
It’s a cake, it’s a custard, it’s what lemon curd would be if it took a fancy to hobnob with milk and flour in a baking dish. Some nineteenth-century versions of this two-layered milk pudding were made in a pastry crust at a time when the terms “pie” and “pudding” were somewhat interchangeable in American kitchens.
The Joy of Cooking “Lemon Sponge Custard” was one of the first dishes I ever attempted from that contribution to human happiness, and I still make it by more or less the same formula. The amounts given below will fill an 8-inch square Pyrex baking dish. Note that you will also need a larger pan for a water bath.
YIELD: About 8 to 10 servings
1½ cups sugar
4 tablespoons butter
A pinch of salt
Grated lemon zest to taste (anything from ½ to 2 teaspoons)
6 eggs, separated
⅓ cup flour
⅓ to ½ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 cups milk
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream together the sugar, butter, salt, and grated zest. Work in the egg yolks one at a time. Combine the lemon juice and milk. Add the flour and the milk mixture alternately in three or four increments each, being sure each one is thoroughly incorporated before adding the next. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, and stir into the batter, which will have an odd half-curdled look (don’t worry). Butter a shallow 2-quart baking dish and gently pour in the mixture.
Have ready a kettle of boiling water. Set the baking dish in a slightly larger pan, slide the whole thing almost all the way into the oven, then carefully pour enough hot water into the larger pan to come about an inch up the sides of the dish. Bake for 1 hour; the top will be something like a sponge cake and the bottom will be a creamy custard. It can be served hot, but I prefer it well chilled. The Rombauers’ recommended accompaniments of “thick cream or raspberry sauce” cannot be improved on.
ABOUT VANILLA ICE CREAM
The effect I love most in ice cream is delicacy, not over-the-top richness or flavors revved up to something like bombing-raid intensity. Give me “plain vanilla,” which to my mind is anything but plain when made with that rarest of treasures, very fresh unhomogenized cream.
There are two general American approaches to ice cream making. Custard-based ice cream (sometimes called “French”) uses a cooked mixture similar to crème anglaise, and acquires a voluptuous finish and rounded flavor from eggs or egg yolks. “Philadelphia” ice cre
am is chancier but, I think, more beautiful in its simplicity. Its basic texture rests on nothing but a combination of cream and sugar, its flavor (in the vanilla version) only on sweetened cream and vanilla. There is nothing to disguise the quality of the cream and vanilla; if they’re indifferent, the ice cream will be nothing special. And freshness is everything in Philadelphia ice cream. Serve a particularly good batch within hours of freezing, and you will taste ice cream as the great nineteenth-century Philadelphia cookbook author Eliza Leslie meant it to taste.
VANILLA ICE CREAM I: CUSTARD-BASED
This is what Eliza Leslie, in the 1851 Miss Leslie’s Directions for Cookery, labeled “Frozen Custard”—as opposed to “ice-cream, for which it frequently passes.” Today, however, it is probably the most familiar American style of ice cream. The main reason is that first-class cream from small local dairies no longer exists as an option for most manufacturers; custard-based or French ice cream doesn’t expose the indifferent quality of the basic ingredient as glaringly as the Philadelphia counterpart.
Because of the richness lent by the eggs, I prefer to use a combination of heavy and light cream with milk. See this page for more on the crucial gradations of cream.
Milk Page 17