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Ground Rice Pudding
1/2 cup ground rice, 3 cups milk, 3 eggs, 4 tablespoons sugar, rind 1/2 lemon, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/4 cup Sultana raisins, and brown breadcrumbs. Boil milk slowly, sprinkle in ground rice, boil 6 minutes. Remove add sugar and Crisco. Mix well, cool a little, add eggs well beaten, stir and flavor with grated lemon rind. Crisco plain mold, dust with toasted bread-crumbs. Pour in pudding. Bake 1 hour in moderate oven. Serve with following sauce: 1 small lemon, 1 cup water, 1 teaspoon cornstarch, 1 tablespoon sugar, and few drops red color. Put cornstarch into pan with lemon juice, add other ingredients and bring to boil.
A baked rice-flour custard from a Crisco promotional cookbook, closer to a milk pudding than to the rice puddings made with whole grains. A few of the original's instructions need filling in.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, ideally the slightly gritty coarse-ground sort sold in Asian and Indian groceries rather than the powder-fine flour used in gluten-free baking. Either works, but the coarse grind gives the pudding a texture closer to what the book intended.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, hence its appearance where an English cook would have used butter. Substitute 2 tablespoons butter in the pudding and butter for greasing the mold with no loss.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. The recipe bakes the mold directly, but because the mixture is egg-enriched, setting the mold in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides is useful insurance against the edges setting hard before the center does. The rice flour gives it more tolerance than a plain custard would have.
- The raisinsSultanas are listed among the ingredients but never mentioned again in the method. Stir them in with the beaten eggs, or scatter them over the crumbed mold before pouring the pudding in.
- Cooling before the eggs"Cool a little" is the hinge. The boiled rice mixture must drop to roughly hand-warm before the beaten eggs go in, or they will scramble in streaks through the pudding.
- Boiling the riceSix minutes is enough only with constant stirring, and rice flour catches on the bottom of the pan quickly. Sprinkle it into the milk in a thin stream while whisking to avoid lumps.
- The sauceOne teaspoon cornstarch to a cup of water gives a pouring sauce barely thicker than water. The recipe does not say what the 'few drops red color' were; cochineal and the early coal-tar dyes were both in use at the time. Leave it out or use any modern food coloring.
- Doneness and yieldAn hour at 350F should leave the center just barely trembling; a knife inserted off-center comes out clean. The quantities need a mold of at least 1 1/2 quarts and serve about six.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble, one of a series of cookbooks issued to persuade American cooks that Crisco, introduced in 1911, could stand in for butter and lard in everything from pastry to puddings — which is why a shortening appears in a delicate lemon custard where butter would be the obvious choice. The pudding itself is squarely English in ancestry: ground-rice puddings appear in British household cookery through the nineteenth century as an economical nursery and invalid dish, thickened with rice flour rather than whole grains and turned out of a mold. Dusting the greased mold with toasted breadcrumbs is the old trick for getting a molded pudding to release cleanly while giving it a faintly nutty crust, and it works as well now as it did then.