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Rice Pudding
Rice pudding is eaten by everybody, even the most delicate. A good way to make it is as follows: In a quart bowl, take two eggs and two heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar, well beaten together; fill the bowl half full of cooked rice, bits of butter, and a handful of raisins; stir all well together, and then fill the bowl with new milk. After the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, bake in a hot oven half an hour. When set away to cool, take a spoon and stir it up, so as to mix in the melted butter on the top and the raisins in the bottom. Eat with cream, slightly sweetened. Season with nutmeg, or whatever you like.
A baked rice custard built by volume in the bowl it bakes in, which makes it forgiving but vague. The measurements below are what the quart-bowl method actually amounts to.
- Quantities in cupsA quart bowl half filled with cooked rice is about 2 cups; topping it up with milk takes roughly 2 cups more, minus what the eggs and sugar occupy. Expect about 2 eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 cups cooked rice, 2 tablespoons butter in bits, 1/3 cup raisins and 1 1/2 to 2 cups milk.
- "Hot oven" is too hot for a custardPeriod equivalences put a hot oven at roughly 400-450F, which risks curdling an egg-and-milk mixture before it sets. Bake at 325-350F and judge by the centre being just barely wobbly; half an hour is about right at the lower end for a shallow dish, longer for a deep bowl.
- New milkMilk fresh from the cow, unskimmed and not soured. Whole milk is the closest thing; a splash of cream in it gets nearer the original richness.
- Ovenproof vesselThe recipe mixes and bakes in the same bowl, so it assumes an ovenproof one. Modern glass or ceramic bakeware is fine, but not a thin mixing bowl. A water bath is not called for here and is not needed at 325F.
- The stirring stepStirring the pudding to redistribute the butter from the top and the raisins from the bottom is part of the method, not an afterthought. The recipe has you do it as it cools; it blends more easily while still warm, since a fully cold set custard tends to break up rather than mix.
- RiceAny plain cooked white rice works, though a starchy short or medium grain thickens the custard better than long grain. Leftover rice is exactly what this was written for.
- YieldAbout four servings. Serve warm or cold with lightly sweetened cream, and grate the nutmeg over at the table rather than into the batter if you want the aroma to carry.
Baked rice puddings run through English and American cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and the dish is often associated with invalid and nursery cookery — which is precisely what the opening line about "the most delicate" is signalling. Rice was cheap, grown in quantity in the Carolinas and later the Gulf states, and it stretched eggs and milk into something filling and bland enough to be prescribed for the sick. The construction here measures everything against the sides of a quart bowl rather than in cups. Note too that this is a leftovers recipe: it begins with rice already cooked, the sort of instruction that appears in a book written for a kitchen where nothing edible was thrown away.