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Caramel Rice Pudding
1/3 cupful rice 1/2 teaspoonful lemon extract 3 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 cupfuls milk 1/4 cupful sultana raisins 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar 1/4 cupful granulated sugar Melt granulated sugar in small saucepan and cook until brown, but do not burn; pour it while hot into pudding mold and spread it all over inside. Wash rice, parboil, drain, and cook slowly in milk thirty minutes; turn into basin, add powdered sugar, Crisco, salt, raisins, extract, and eggs well beaten and pour into prepared mold. Set mold in pan of boiling water and bake in oven till quite set. Turn out and serve hot or cold.
A caramel-lined rice custard baked in a water bath, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks of the mid-1910s. It works well, but the original assumes you know several things it does not say.
- Watch the caramel, not the clockMelting the granulated sugar dry in a small pan takes it from clear to amber in seconds at the end. Pour it into the mold and tilt immediately; it sets hard within about half a minute and cannot be spread once it does.
- "Powdered sugar" is ambiguous hereIn American books of this period the term sometimes means finely milled granulated sugar and sometimes what we now call confectioners' sugar. Either works in the custard; confectioners' sugar carries a little cornstarch, which slightly thickens the set.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Two tablespoons of any neutral solid shortening does the job, and unsalted butter is better tasting if you are not reproducing the original exactly.
- SultanasGolden raisins. Ordinary dark raisins substitute directly; plumping them in hot water for ten minutes keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- The riceUse a short or medium grain white rice. Parboil means a few minutes in plain boiling water to part-cook it, then drain before the thirty minutes in milk. Stir occasionally; two cups of milk to a third cup of rice scorches easily over direct heat.
- Cool before adding eggsThe rice comes off the heat very hot. Let it drop to warm before beating in the eggs, or you will get threads of scrambled egg through the pudding.
- Oven and donenessThe book gives no temperature. For a water bath, a moderate oven of about 325 to 350F suits it; in a quart mold expect somewhere near an hour, but go by the pudding. It is done when the center barely trembles and a knife an inch from the edge comes out clean; a fully firm center means it has gone past custard into rubber.
- UnmoldingLet it stand five to ten minutes so the caramel dissolves into syrup, run a knife around the edge, then invert onto a rimmed dish. The caramel runs, and a flat plate will not hold it.
- YieldRoughly four to six servings, assuming about a one-quart mold.
Rice puddings baked in a caramel-lined mold sit close to the English nursery rice pudding on one side and the French creme caramel on the other, where sugar cooked to amber is used both to line the mold and to sauce the turned-out pudding. What dates this particular version is the Crisco: the hydrogenated vegetable shortening was introduced by Procter and Gamble in 1911, and the company commissioned cookbooks in which the product appears in nearly every recipe, including sweets where an older book would simply have said butter. A Calendar of Dinners, credited to Marion Harris Neil, belongs to that campaign, organizing a full year of menus around the new fat.