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Poor Man's Pudding
A quart of milk, half tea-cup rice, salt to taste, and one tea-cup sugar (some add table-spoon butter); place in oven while cold, stirring occasionally while the rice is swelling. Bake quite slowly two hours or more. It should be cream-like when done, and must be taken immediately from oven. A good test is to tip dish; if rice and milk move together it is done; if not sufficiently cooked the milk runs; if neither move it is done too much. To vary this, a small cup raisins and a tea-spoon lemon or vanilla may be added. This is a delicious pudding when properly baked, and may be eaten warm or cold with sugar or cream. --Mrs. Louise Lincoln, New Rutland, Ill.
A plain baked rice pudding with no eggs and no thickener beyond the starch of the rice, so everything depends on a low oven and pulling it out at the right moment.
- The hinge: take it out earlyThe pudding sets further as it cools, so it must leave the oven while still loose and creamy. The tip test in the original is sound — rice and milk sliding as one mass means done; milk running ahead of the rice means it needs more time; nothing moving at all means the starch has bound up and the texture is lost.
- "Quite slowly"A slow oven, in the region of 275-300F in a modern range; the book itself gives no temperatures. Much above 325F risks scorching at the edges before the rice has softened.
- RiceUse a short- or medium-grain white rice (pudding rice, arborio, or plain short-grain). Long-grain works but stays separate rather than going creamy, and parboiled or instant rice will not release enough starch to thicken the milk.
- MilkWhole milk. Milk of the period was unhomogenized and not standardised for fat; skim milk gives a thin, watery pudding. The optional tablespoon of butter is worth adding.
- MeasuresA quart is 4 cups. A tea-cup was commonly reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, which puts half a tea-cup of rice at roughly 1/3 cup and the sugar near 3/4 cup. A third to a half cup of sugar is enough for a quart of milk if you want it less sweet.
- Dish and starting coldUse a wide 2-quart baking dish so the milk has surface area to reduce. Putting it in cold, as directed, lets the rice swell gradually — no soaking or pre-cooking is needed.
- StirringStir two or three times in the first hour to keep the rice from settling into a raft on the bottom, then leave it alone so a skin can form on top.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. Good warm with cream, or cold, when it firms to something close to a set custard.
Rice puddings of this kind — rice, milk, sugar and a very slow oven, with no eggs at all — were the cheapest sweet a nineteenth-century household could put on the table, which is generally taken to be the sense the name preserves. "Poor man's" recipes appear throughout Victorian American cookbooks as a badge of thrift rather than an apology: the same logic gives us poor man's pudding and poor man's cake (no eggs, no butter). Rice arrived cheap and plentiful from the Carolina and later Louisiana crops, and milk was readily available to many rural Ohio or Illinois families, so the pudding cost little beyond the fuel to bake it. Buckeye Cookery (1877) collected such recipes by name and town from contributing housewives, and Mrs. Lincoln's careful tip test is the sort of practical detail that comes from long familiarity with an oven that had no thermometer.