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Hasty Pudding, or Farmer's Rice
Mix a well-beaten egg with as much flour as it will moisten. Rub it between the hands until it is in small dry lumps, like bread-crumbs. Stir these into a quart of boiling milk, and beat over the fire until the pudding is thick and smooth. Serve with treacle, butter, sugar, or cream. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A frugal milk pudding thickened with egg-and-flour crumbs rather than cornmeal — closer to German Riebele or Italian pasta grattata than to a baked pudding. Almost everything depends on how you handle the crumbs.
- The hinge: keep the crumbs dry and separateRub the egg into the flour until you have loose, sandy lumps no bigger than coarse breadcrumbs, then sieve off any excess dry flour. If the crumbs are damp or clumped, they fuse in the milk and you get a paste instead of the little rice-like grains the second name refers to.
- How much flour"As much flour as it will moisten" works out at roughly 3 to 4 oz (about a cup) of plain flour to one large egg, depending on the egg. Work in flour until no wet patches remain, then stop.
- A quart of milkThe book is British, so this is an imperial quart — 40 fl oz, about 1.15 litres. A US quart (32 fl oz) gives a noticeably thicker pudding; add a splash more milk if you use it.
- Adding to boiling milkScatter the crumbs in a little at a time while whisking, or they sink and weld to the pan base. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan and drop to a bare simmer once the crumbs are in; milk thickened with flour scorches quickly.
- Twenty minutes is not paddingThe full time is needed to cook the raw starch out; shorter and the pudding tastes of flour paste. Stir throughout — the recipe's "beat over the fire" means near-constant motion.
- TreacleTreacle here means dark (black) treacle or the lighter golden syrup. Black treacle is close kin to molasses, though blackstrap is sharper and more bitter than either; golden syrup gives the mildest result, dark treacle the most old-fashioned.
- Yield and servingFive or six small portions, served hot in bowls straight from the pan. It sets firm as it cools, so anything held back should be loosened with a little hot milk.
Hasty pudding is a long-established name in English domestic cookery — a pudding "hasty" because it was stirred together in a pot over the fire rather than boiled for hours in a cloth or baked in a crust. The English version was traditionally flour, oatmeal or breadcrumbs beaten into boiling milk or water; the American one substituted cornmeal, which is why the phrase now reads as colonial New England to many readers. The alternative title here, Farmer's Rice, appears to describe the look of the finished dish rather than its contents: the egg-and-flour crumbs swell in the milk into small separate grains resembling boiled rice. A quart of milk, one egg and a handful of flour, costed at fivepence and stretched across six people, belongs to the same Victorian project of teaching cheap, filling, nourishing dishes to households without much to spend.