Milk, one quart
Rice, seven ounces
Sugar, five and a half ounces
Sweet almonds with four bitter ones, three and a half ounces
Candied cedar (angelica), one ounce
Three whole eggs
Five egg-yolks
Taste of lemon peel
A pinch of salt
Powered sugar

"Skin the almonds and grind or pound them with two tablespoonfuls of the sugar.



Cut the candied cedar in very small cubes. Cook the rice in the milk until it is quite firm, put in all the ingredients except the eggs, which are added when the mixture is cold.



Put the entire mixture in a baking tin greased with butter and sprinkled with bread crumbs ground fine, harden in the oven and after 24 hours cut the tart into diamonds.



When serving dust with powdered sugar."

This recipe was taken from "The Italian Cook Book: the Art of Eating Well, Practical Recipes of the Italian Cuisine" by Mrs. Maria Gentile. It was published in the U.S. in 1919. For the entire copyright-free cookbook see www.archive.org........P.S. These rice tarts are quite pleasant, despite (or inspite of) the fact that the flavor is rather exotic, and quite unlike anything that is presently found in today's Italian pastry shops. Well, this might be somewhat of an exaggeration, still, the combination of sweet and bitter almonds does provide a rather non-Italian, almost Asian, quality to the recipe. Nowadays about the only thing North Americans associate the flavor of bitter almonds is with Italy's famous "amaretti" cookies. Most recipes for amaretti cookies call for "bitter almond extract" rather than for the bitter almonds themselves which is not necessarily a bad thing as bitter almonds are hard to find in local shops. As far as I know few modern-day Italian recipes (other than for amaretti cookies) make use of bitter almonds. This is a real shame as just a few of these awful-tasting nuts pack a big punch (Bitter almonds are not really edible on their own -- they have to be combined with sweet almonds and mixed with sugar for them to be of any value in the taste department). Actually, I myself had never made use of "bitter almonds" prior to this year [2010]. The author of "The Italian Cook Book," Mrs. Maria Gentile, is one of the few individuals who took the trouble to look for Italian dessert recipes. Most other foreign-born writers realized that Italians avoided doing desserts -- except for religious holidays, and their collection of recipes reflects this. I believe (I could be wrong) Mrs. Gentile includes more dessert recipes than any other North American food writer of the early part of the 20th century. However, most of the recipes she includes are difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate. As none of the cakes, for example, use baking powder, the probability that the batter will rise when it is in the oven and then fall when it is fully cooked and cooled, is, alas, very high. In any case, Mrs. Gentile seems rather partial to recipes that include bitter almonds because she is one of the few cookbook writers publishing in the early 20th century that includes them in her collection (And that was a really good thing as they might have been lost otherwise). Mrs. Gentile also seems to favor the presentation of sweets in diamond-shaped forms. Whether this form was popular at the turn of the last century throughout Italy, or whether it was popular with the particular Italian pastry chef she had the pleasure to know, will remain a mystery. As with the other cookbook writers of this time frame, little is known about them.... Photo and notes: Mary Melfi.

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