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Oxford Pudding
Wash six ounces of best Carolina rice in two or three waters. Drain it well and put it into a pudding-cloth, with three ounces of picked currants, or, if preferred, two large apples, pared, cored, and sliced, and a little grated nutmeg. Tie the cloth loosely to give the rice room to swell, and let the pudding boil quickly until done enough. Serve with sweet sauce. Time to boil, two hours. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A boiled cloth pudding of the plainest sort: rice, dried fruit or apple, and nutmeg, swelled inside a knotted cloth over two hours. Almost everything that can go wrong here comes down to how the cloth is tied.
- Tie loosely — that is the whole trickSix ounces of dry rice will roughly treble in volume as it absorbs water. A cloth tied snug gives you a dense, gummy core with hard grains at the centre; leave a good third of the bag empty so the rice can move and swell evenly.
- The pudding clothUse unbleached calico or a doubled square of muslin, about 20 inches. Scald it and wring it out before filling. Tie with kitchen string, not a knot in the cloth itself.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, and in Victorian Britain the standard for puddings. Any decent long-grain white rice stands in. Do not use basmati, which is too fragrant, or arborio, which will collapse to paste in two hours.
- "Two or three waters"Rinsing until the water runs nearly clear removes surface starch. Skip it and the pudding sets solid rather than in distinguishable grains.
- Boil quickly, and keep it coveredA hard rolling boil, with the pudding fully submerged the whole time. Top up with boiling water from a kettle as it evaporates — cold water added mid-cook stops the boil and gives you a heavy pudding. Two hours is right for this quantity.
- Currants"Picked" means gone over by hand for stalks and grit, which packet currants no longer need. Three ounces is a generous half-cup. Modern dried currants need no soaking.
- Sweet sauce"Sweet sauce" here means a sweet pudding sauce: commonly milk thickened with a little cornflour, sugar and nutmeg or brandy, or else melted butter beaten with sugar and lemon. The pudding itself contains no sugar at all, so the sauce is not optional.
- Turning outDip the bag briefly in cold water before untying; it releases the cloth from the surface. Yield is stated as five or six, which is generous by modern appetites for something this plain.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth were the workhorse of the English kitchen from the seventeenth century onward, cheap because they cooked in the same pot as the meat and needed no oven — a real consideration in households without one. Cassell's prices this at fourpence for six people, which places it firmly among the economical rice dishes that fill the pudding chapters of late-Victorian compendia, when imported rice was abundant and cheap. The name is one of several university puddings in the period repertoire, alongside Cambridge and College puddings; such names are often said to have been attached loosely by cookbook compilers rather than traced to any particular kitchen. "Carolina rice" refers to the long-grain crop of the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, grown on rice plantations by enslaved West Africans whose agricultural knowledge underpinned the industry; by the time this dictionary appeared the name had become a general grade term for good long-grain rice as much as a statement of origin.