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Coburg Pudding
3 cups milk, 1/2 cup rice, 1 cup boiling water, 1 egg, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon powdered cinnamon, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Well wash rice, sprinkle it into boiling water and cook gently until all water is absorbed. Heat milk, in double saucepan if possible, add half-cooked rice and boil gently until it is perfectly soft and of thick creamy consistency. Should it become too thick before it is really soft, add more milk. Beat egg, until very light, add half sugar to it. When rice is cooked, whisk egg in at once, a little at a time. Then add salt and piece of Crisco size of walnut. Turn mixture into dish in which it is to be served. Mix rest of sugar with cinnamon. Sprinkle this evenly over top of rice. Put rest of Crisco in small pieces over top of pudding just before it is required. Place pudding in front of fire, or in oven for second or two, when Crisco, etc., will form a delicious sauce over surface of pudding.
A stovetop rice pudding finished with a cinnamon-sugar crust rather than a long bake. The hinge is the egg: it goes into rice hot off the heat, whisked in a little at a time, and the pudding is never boiled again.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, so vegetable shortening appears where an English cook would have used butter. Butter is the better choice here, since the fat melts into the sugar as a barely heated sauce and shortening contributes no flavour of its own.
- "Size of walnut"Traditionally a piece of fat of roughly an ounce, but the recipe allows only 1 tablespoon of Crisco in all, so treat the walnut-sized piece as part of that tablespoon and keep the remainder back to dot over the top.
- RiceUse short- or medium-grain white rice — pudding rice, Arborio or Calrose. Long-grain and parboiled rice will not break down into the "thick creamy consistency" the recipe wants, and brown rice will not work at all in this timing.
- TimingThe rice absorbs the cup of boiling water in about 10 minutes, then wants 30 to 45 minutes in the milk over gentle heat, stirred often. In a double boiler it is slower but nothing scorches; over direct heat use the lowest setting and a heavy pan.
- Tempering the eggTake the pan off the heat before whisking the beaten egg in, and add it in thin streams while stirring. Poured in at once, or over heat, it scrambles into threads.
- "In front of fire, or in oven for second or two"A brief blast of radiant heat to melt the fat and sugar, not to cook the pudding further. A broiler for 2 to 3 minutes, watched closely, or a kitchen torch will do it; a conventional oven will tend to heat the pudding through before the sugar colours.
- Assembly orderThe cinnamon sugar goes on when the pudding is dished; the remaining fat only just before serving, so it melts rather than soaks in. Doing both early gives a damp grey top instead of a glaze.
- YieldFour modest servings, or three generous ones. Serve warm — the surface "sauce" sets solid as it cools.
Puddings named Coburg turn up across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British cookery, and the name is generally traced to the House of Saxe-Coburg and the fashion for royal-flavoured dish names that followed Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert in 1840; the label attached to several unrelated things, including a round crusty loaf, so it signals prestige more than any fixed formula. The version here is a plain milk-and-rice pudding of the kind that fed English nurseries by the ton, lifted only by a cinnamon-sugar crust melted at the fire. Its appearance in A Calendar of Dinners — a book issued to put Crisco into American kitchens after the shortening's introduction in 1911 — explains the odd substitution of vegetable fat for butter in a recipe that is otherwise entirely traditional.