Mix ¾ cup of rice in 1 quart of milk; add 1 cup of sugar, a pinch of salt and 1 teaspoonful of vanilla. Pour into a pudding-dish. Put bits of butter over the top and let bake in a moderate oven until done. Serve cold.
December 2 — No. 2
Swedish
A baked rice pudding of the plainest kind: raw rice, milk, sugar, and time. Almost everything depends on the oven being low enough and the bake long enough for the grains to swell without the milk breaking.
- The hinge: low and slow"a moderate oven" is usually reckoned at around 350F, though period usage covers roughly 325-375F. A milk pudding started with raw rice does better nearer 300-325F: at 350F and above the surface sets and browns long before the grains soften, and the milk is liable to curdle at the edges.
- How long "until done" isReckon on 2 to 2 1/2 hours uncovered. The pudding is ready when the rice is tender and the liquid has thickened to a loose custard; it firms considerably as it cools, so pull it while it still looks slightly slack.
- Which riceUse a short- or medium-grain white rice — arborio, pudding rice, or Calrose. Long-grain and parboiled rice stay separate and grainy and will never give the creaminess the method depends on. Do not rinse it; the surface starch is what thickens the milk.
- MilkWhole milk. Skim and low-fat are more prone to scorching and separating over a two-hour bake. A quart to 3/4 cup of rice is a generous ratio, which is correct — the rice will take up most of it.
- SugarA full cup is sweet by modern taste; 1/2 to 2/3 cup gives a pudding that still reads as dessert. If you reduce it, expect slightly less browning on top.
- VanillaVanilla extract stirred in at the start loses most of its aroma over two hours in the oven. Either use a split vanilla bean in the milk, or hold the extract back and stir it in during the last twenty minutes.
- The skinStirring once or twice in the first hour helps distribute the rice; after that leave it alone so the buttered top browns into a skin. If you would rather not have the skin, cover for the first ninety minutes.
- Yield and servingServes about six. Served cold, as directed, it sets to a soft, spoonable pudding; a spoonful of thin cream or a tart fruit preserve loosens it and cuts the sweetness.
Sweden's rice puddings are Christmas food, and this one falls on 2 December in a calendar cookbook. The ancestor is risgrynsgröt, a stovetop rice porridge cooked in milk and eaten with cinnamon and sugar, traditionally hiding a single blanched almond — whoever finds it is said to be next to marry. A related dish, ris à la Malta, folds the cooled porridge into whipped cream. Rice was an imported luxury in Scandinavia for centuries, which is exactly what made a dish of it appropriate for the feast rather than for ordinary days. The baked version given here is really an Anglo-American oven pudding wearing a Swedish name: the compilers of these "dishes of all nations" books were generally working from a national association rather than from a Swedish kitchen, and the technique — raw rice, milk, dots of butter, a slow oven — is the same one that turns up under a dozen other headings in English-language cookery of the period.