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Rice Pudding without Eggs
A pudding without eggs can be made by taking one cup of rice to one-half gallon milk and one cup of sugar. Bake until the rice is done. Flavor to your taste.
A three-ingredient baked custard-style rice pudding that relies entirely on slow evaporation rather than eggs for body. The original gives no oven temperature or time, so those are the two things worth pinning down.
- The measurements in modern termsHalf a gallon of milk is 8 cups (2 quarts, about 1.9 litres). With 1 cup of raw rice and 1 cup of sugar, that is a very loose 8:1 liquid-to-rice ratio, which is what makes the finished pudding creamy instead of stodgy.
- Oven temperatureBake at 300F. Anything hotter and the milk skins over and scorches at the edges long before the rice in the middle has swelled. A shallow, wide dish gives better reduction than a deep one.
- TimeExpect 2 1/2 to 3 hours uncovered at 300F. The rice should be entirely tender and the milk thickened to a loose custard; it will set further as it cools, so pull it while it still looks slightly slack.
- Stir the skin inFor the first two hours, stir the browned skin back into the pudding every 30 minutes. The original does not call for this, but with no eggs the body comes from rice starch and slow evaporation, and folding the skin back in helps the creaminess along.
- Rice choiceUse a short or medium grain white rice, which sheds enough starch to thicken the milk. Long grain stays more separate; parboiled or converted rice releases far less starch and will thicken the milk poorly.
- MilkWhole milk. Skim or 1% will not carry three hours of baking without turning thin and slightly grainy. A splash of cream at the end is a period-appropriate improvement.
- "Flavor to your taste"The usual flavourings for a milk pudding of this sort are grated nutmeg over the top, a strip of lemon peel, a stick of cinnamon fished out before serving, or vanilla. Add vanilla in the last half hour, since long baking dulls it.
- SugarA full cup for 8 cups of milk is sweet by current taste. Two-thirds of a cup can be substituted if preferred, and does not affect the set.
- YieldRoughly 2 quarts of finished pudding, serving eight generously. Good warm, and firmer when cold the next day.
Baked rice pudding of this kind belonged to the economical end of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dessert repertoire: milk, rice and sugar were cheap and keep-able staples, and the oven was often already hot from the day's other baking. The specification "without eggs" is the point of the entry; eggs were seasonal and dear, scarcer in winter when hens stopped laying, and eggless versions of custard-adjacent dishes are common in books of the period. Thickening milk with grain is an old practice, running back through medieval and early modern milk pottages.