Heat 1 quart of milk; add 1 cup of boiled rice, 3 ounces of seeded raisins and 2 ounces of currants. Let cook ten minutes. Then add the grated peel of a lemon, ¼ of a grated nutmeg and the yolks of 6 eggs well beaten with 1 cup of sugar. Mix thoroughly and pour into a well-buttered pudding-dish; let bake until done. Then beat the whites to a stiff froth with 3 tablespoonfuls of pulverized sugar; flavor with vanilla. Spread on the pudding and let brown slightly in a hot oven. Serve with lemon sauce.
A baked rice custard finished with meringue, written for a cook who already knew what a set custard looks like. The only real difficulty is that the original gives neither temperature nor time.
- The hinge: keep the custard gentleSix yolks in a quart of milk will curdle if the oven runs hot. Bake at 325-350F, and set the dish in a pan of hot water if your oven is uneven. It is done when the centre trembles as a unit and a knife an inch from the edge comes out clean, roughly 45 minutes to an hour in a 2-quart dish.
- Temper the yolksThe milk and rice have just cooked ten minutes, so whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into the beaten yolks and sugar before combining. Adding yolks straight to near-boiling milk gives you sweet scrambled egg.
- "A hot oven" for the meringueThat means 400-425F for the browning stage only, three to five minutes with the door watched. Alternatively, run it under a broiler for a minute. The pudding underneath should already be fully set.
- 1 cup of boiled riceCooked, not raw — about a third of a cup of dry short or medium grain rice, boiled soft in water or milk and drained. Long-grain works but stays separate rather than melting into the custard.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Two ounces is roughly a third of a cup. Seeded raisins means raisins with the seeds removed; today's supermarket raisins are seedless varieties instead, so no extra work is needed.
- A quarter of a grated nutmegClose to a level half teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg — assertive, but in a quart of milk it reads as warmth rather than spice. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of this; grate it if you can.
- Pulverized sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Three tablespoons for six whites is a soft, lightly sweetened meringue that will weep a little if the pudding is left standing.
- Lemon sauceOne common period version is a simple cornstarch sauce: sugar, water, a little cornstarch cooked until clear, then butter and lemon juice off the heat. It cuts the richness of six yolks and is worth making.
- YieldA quart of milk plus rice and eggs fills a 2- to 2 1/2-quart dish and serves eight. Best warm or at room temperature; refrigerate leftovers, though the meringue will slump.
Sweetened baked rice with dried fruit and eggs turns up across Central and Eastern Europe, and Polish versions go by names such as ryż zapiekany or budyń ryżowy — rice baked or set with egg, sometimes crowned with meringue. Books of this kind were a genre of their own around the turn of the twentieth century: a dish a day, each tagged with a nationality, offering American households a year of variety without much regard for whether the attribution would survive scrutiny.