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Millet Pudding
Like sago and other small seeds, millet should be washed before boiling. Simmer over a slow fire, stirring carefully, four ounces of millet, in nearly a quart of milk. Flavour with the thin rind of lemon, cinnamon, or nutmeg. When cooled, sweeten and stir in four beaten eggs. Fill a well-buttered pie-dish, and bake; or the pudding may be boiled, in which case more millet for the same quantity of milk must be used. Boil in a basin, well buttered. Time, about an hour to bake; to boil, an hour and a half; fifteen minutes to simmer. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain milk pudding of the sago-and-tapioca family, thickened with whole millet rather than rice. The book gives times and quantities but leaves the sugar, the oven heat and the point of the cooling step unstated.
- Cool before the eggs go inThis is the hinge. Four beaten eggs stirred into near-boiling milk will curdle into sweet scrambled egg. Let the simmered millet drop to hand-warm, then beat the eggs in off the heat.
- The millet to buyHulled proso millet, sold as millet grain in wholefood shops. Not birdseed millet, which is unhulled, and not the flour. Rinse it in a sieve until the water runs clear to shed the dusty, faintly bitter coating.
- Quantities in metricFour ounces of millet is about 115 g, a little over half a cup. "Nearly a quart" of milk is about a litre if the book means the imperial quart of 40 fl oz (1136 ml); on a US quart it would be nearer 900 ml. Whole milk gives the right set.
- Fifteen minutes is not enough on its ownThe grain will still be firm after the specified simmer; the baking finishes it. If you take the boiled route, or want a softer set, give it 20-25 minutes on the stove and expect the milk to thicken noticeably.
- Oven heatBake at 325-350F (160-180C). Standing the pie-dish in a roasting tin of hot water keeps the egg from setting grainy at the edges before the middle is done. An hour is about right; the centre should wobble as a whole, not ripple.
- SweeteningNo amount is given. Two to three ounces (55-85 g) of caster sugar suits a quart of milk without turning it into a dessert. Fish out the lemon rind before the eggs go in.
- The boiled versionThe recipe does not quantify "more millet"; something like 6 oz (170 g) for the same milk should let the mixture hold its shape when turned out. Butter the basin well, cover with pleated foil or a floured cloth tied under the rim, and keep the water at a steady simmer, topping it up as it drops.
- YieldFive or six as the book says, in a dish of about 1.5 litres. It is best warm; refrigerated overnight it firms considerably and is better sliced than spooned.
Millet was the poor relation of English milk puddings, sitting alongside rice, sago, tapioca and semolina in Victorian cookery books as one more small starchy seed that could be swelled in milk and bound with egg. The method is interchangeable: learn the ratio of grain to milk to egg and the particular seed hardly matters. Proso millet had long been grown across Europe and Asia as a fast, drought-tolerant crop, but in nineteenth-century Britain it arrived mostly as an import and never displaced rice in the nursery pudding. The instruction to wash it first is not fussiness -- hulled grain of the period carried mill dust and grit, and millet's outer layer turns bitter as its oils age, which is still true of grain that has sat too long on a shelf.