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Rice Pudding (For a pudding dish holding two)
For a pudding dish holding two quarts, take two-thirds of a cupful of rice and two-thirds of a cupful of raisins; fill the dish partly full of milk and steam the rice and raisins an hour or more, or till the raisins are plump and soft, then add the eggs, beaten with two-thirds of a cupful of sugar, a small piece of butter and a level teaspoonful of salt. Fill the dish with cold milk, and bake three-fourths of an hour. Serve with pudding sauce or cream and sugar.
A slow custard-style rice pudding built in one dish: the rice is softened in milk first, then bound with an egg custard and baked. The original assumes you already know how many eggs go in.
- The missing eggsThe recipe calls for "the eggs" but never says how many, presumably because the number was thought obvious. Period rice puddings vary a good deal; for two quarts, three or four large eggs gives a workable custard, fewer a loose, milky pudding, more a firm sliceable one.
- "Steam the rice"The recipe does not say how; most likely the dish was covered and cooked gently, in a slack oven or set in a pan of hot water, rather than in a steamer basket. A covered dish at a low moderate heat (around 325F) for the first hour works, stirring once or twice so the rice does not settle into a solid raft.
- Oven heat for the bakeNo heat is specified. For the final three-quarters of an hour a moderate oven, 325 to 350F, suits an egg custard; much higher and it curdles and weeps around the edge before the centre sets.
- Rice to usePlain uncooked white rice. Instant rice will not stand an hour in milk, and parboiled or arborio will give a firmer or a starchier, stickier result than intended.
- MilkWhole milk. The pudding depends on milkfat for body, and skim milk in this quantity gives a thin, chalky result. The recipe specifies only "milk"; replacing some of it with cream will enrich the pudding.
- Adding the cold milkThe dish is filled up with cold milk after the eggs go in, which cools the whole thing down before it goes to bake. Temper the beaten eggs with a ladle of the hot rice mixture first, or they may curdle against the hot rice.
- DonenessSet at the edges with a slight wobble at the centre, and a knife slid in an inch from the side comes out clean. It firms further as it cools.
- YieldA two-quart dish serves eight to ten. "Pudding sauce" here means a sweet dessert sauce, typically a hard sauce of butter and sugar or a thin vanilla sauce.
Baked rice pudding sits at the thrifty end of the nineteenth-century dessert repertoire: rice, milk, sugar, eggs and dried fruit, all pantry staples, cooked slowly in a single dish while the oven was already hot from the day's baking. The technique of softening the grain in milk before adding eggs is the older method, inherited from English rice puddings, and it produces a very different texture from the modern approach of stirring cooked rice into a custard — the grains swell and give up starch, thickening the milk itself.