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Eggless Rice Pudding
4 cups milk. 2/3 cup rice. ⅓ cup molasses.
Salt. 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. 1 tablespoon butter. 1/2 cup seeded raisins.
PROCESS: Wash rice; mix ingredients in the order given and pour into a buttered baking dish; bake three hours in a slow oven, stirring three times during first hour of cooking to prevent rice from settling. When stirring the last time, add butter. Serve with Hard Sauce. (For recipe see Page 161.)
A long, slow baked rice pudding of the New England type, sweetened entirely with molasses in place of the eggs and sugar of a custard version. Nothing here is difficult, but the oven temperature and the stirring are what make or break it.
- Slow ovenIn period usage this covers roughly 275-325F; 300F is a reasonable modern setting. At that heat the three hours are real cooking time, not an exaggeration: the starch has to swell slowly and the milk to reduce and brown at the edges.
- The riceUse raw white long- or medium-grain rice, not parboiled, instant, or anything pre-cooked. Two-thirds of a cup of dry rice absorbs the four cups of milk over the long bake; converted rice will not soften into the same creamy body.
- Molasses quantityA cup and a half is a great deal by modern taste and gives a dark, almost gingerbread-sweet pudding. Use a mild or light molasses rather than blackstrap, which will be harsh. Cutting to a cup is defensible if you want the milk and rice to read at all.
- Molasses and milkMolasses is mildly acidic, and the mixture may look curdled or grainy when it first goes in. It settles as the rice swells.
- StirringRice sinks. The three stirs during the first hour are the hinge of the recipe: skip them and you get a dense raft of rice under a thin brown skin. After the first hour, leave it alone so the top can set.
- SaltThe original leaves it open. Half a teaspoon is right for this volume.
- Dish and yieldA 2-quart buttered baking dish, deep rather than wide, set on a sheet pan in case it boils over. Serves six to eight.
- Hard sauceThe referenced sauce is the standard creamed butter and powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla or a spirit, served cold in a spoonful on the hot pudding. Any current hard sauce recipe will do.
Baked rice pudding sweetened with molasses belongs to the same New England household tradition as Indian pudding, where cornmeal or rice was simmered for hours in milk and darkened with molasses rather than refined sugar, which was long the more expensive sweetener. Eggs were seasonally scarce and dear, which is the likely point of the "eggless" title. The very long slow bake also suits a coal or wood range that has already been fired for the roast, using the falling heat of the oven after the main dish comes out, and hard sauce on a hot pudding is a nineteenth-century convention that persisted well into the twentieth.