ONE of the things I missed most after moving out of my parents’ house was their prodigious and quirky cookbook collection. Whenever I’d visit, I’d page through the volumes, copying out recipes, then subway it home to cook them in my tiny apartment.
A Good Appetite
Adding Elegance to Rice Pudding
Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times
By MELISSA CLARK
Published: April 22, 2011
Recipe
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Caramel Rice Flan (April 27, 2011)
One of my favorite recipes was called Catalan rice flan.
It was unusual in that it wasn’t like the soft and spoonable flans I’d met before. This one baked into a solid yet still creamy cake that I sliced and served in wobbling wedges topped with its own ambrosial caramel sauce. I made it repeatedly for several months, then dropped it to conquer some other culinary frontier — poundcake, I think.
But a recent rice pudding yen made me think about that flan as a more elegant alternative.
The problem was that I no longer had the scribbled recipe, nor could I recall the name of the book from which I’d lifted it.
Meaning I’d pretty much have to start from scratch, beginning with the rice itself.
I knew that, in Catalonia, many of the rice dishes are made with short grain rice. This suited me fine. The pillowy texture of the short grains reminds me of tapioca, with a grainier bite. Short grain rice is also starchier than long grain, which helps the eggs bind the custard. Combining whole eggs and yolks would make the flan rich and light.
I remembered that the original recipe used lemon zest, and to that I added cardamom, both the ground seeds, for their intensity, and the pods, which add a delicate citrus perfume that’s absent from the powder.
Finally, I made sure to get the caramel nice and dark, the depth of milk chocolate but with a reddish cast. When I first made the flan, in my 20s, I was so scared of burning the sugar that I undercooked it, until I realized how much better, nuttier and less sweet dark caramel tastes.
I’d like to write that I whipped up a flan according to plan and that it led to a taste memory explosion of silky smooth custard studded with rice, scented with lemon and spice and glistening with amber syrup.
In fact, I had to make it nine times before I was happy, leaving a trail of crunchy rice, curdled custard and bitter-tasting batches in my path.
Once I had it, I wrote down the recipe and put it in a safe place. I’d finally learned my lesson — nine attempts and 20 years later.
