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Rice Pudding
To a cup of rice boiled in a custard-kettle in a pint of water (seasoned well with salt) until dry, add a pint of milk in which a little corn starch has been dissolved, and boil again; add the yolks of two eggs beaten with half a cup of sugar, stir well together, and lastly add the juice and grated rind of one lemon. Place in a dish, and bake slowly in the oven; when done, spread over the top the whites beaten with two table-spoons sugar, and brown in oven. A cup of raisins may be added just before baking. Or, after boiling the rice with the milk, eggs, and sugar, add a lump of butter and place a layer of the rice, about an inch thick, in a buttered dish sprinkled with bread-crumbs, then a layer of peaches (either fresh or canned), repeating until dish is full, leaving rice for the last layer; bake slowly for half an hour, and when done, cover with the beaten whites, as above. Or, after preparing the rice as above, add pine-apple, chopped fine, or oranges, or dried cherries; mix thoroughly, and bake and finish as above. - Mrs. J. R. W., Madison, Wis.
A rice pudding built on the custard method rather than the long slow bake, finished with meringue and offered in four variations. Most of what needs translating is equipment and oven language.
- Custard-kettleA double boiler. The rice goes in the upper pan over simmering water so the milk and eggs never scorch. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir attentively.
- Bake slowly'Slow' baking is conventionally read today as somewhere around 300F, though the recipe gives no temperature and the book does not define one. The pudding is already cooked when it goes in; the bake is only to set the custard, so 30 to 40 minutes is enough. The meringue browns faster, five to eight minutes, and can go under a broiler instead.
- A little corn starchUnmeasured, but the intent is a light thickener against curdling: about a tablespoon dissolved in a little of the cold milk before the rest goes in. More than that turns the pudding pasty.
- Tempering the yolksThe hinge of the recipe. Beat the yolks with the sugar, then work a ladle of the hot rice mixture into them before returning everything to the pan, or the yolks scramble in threads through the pudding.
- Rice and liquidA cup of rice (the variety is not specified) in a pint of salted water, cooked dry, then a pint of milk. Short-grain or arborio gives a creamier result; either way the mixture should be loose when it goes into the dish, since it firms considerably as it cools.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith beneath is bitter.
- The peach versionCanned peaches should be drained well or the layers weep and the bottom crumbs go to sludge. Fresh peaches want to be ripe but firm.
- YieldFills a 1.5- to 2-quart dish and serves six to eight. Best warm or at room temperature; the meringue weeps in the refrigerator overnight.
Rice puddings run through nineteenth-century American cookbooks in two families: the plain kind, where raw rice, milk and sugar are left in a slow oven for hours until a skin forms, and the enriched kind, where cooked rice is bound with a stirred custard and dressed up. This is firmly the second, and its lemon, meringue top and fruit layers put it closer to a company dessert than to nursery food. Buckeye Cookery, which appeared in Ohio in a succession of editions in the later 1870s and was compiled from contributions by housewives across the Midwest, is full of such signed entries; the initials and town were the credential. The four variations packed into one paragraph reflect how these books were used, as a single tested method a cook would ring changes on with whatever fruit the season or the pantry shelf provided, canned peaches and pineapple among them.