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Portuguese Pudding
Boil half a pint of milk with three inches of thin lemon-rind. Stir into it, when boiling, three dessert-spoonfuls of ground rice which has been mixed smoothly with three table-spoonfuls of cream. Stir the mixture over the fire for two minutes after it boils, then pour it out to cool. Add a little sugar, together with the yolks of three and the whites of two eggs well beaten. Pour the pudding into a buttered dish, and bake in a moderate oven. When done enough, take out the pudding, and let it stand until it is cold and stiff. Before serving, lay upon it a little apricot or any other fine jam. Time to bake, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 9d., exclusive of the jam. Sufficient for a small dish.
A baked ground-rice custard, set firm, chilled, and finished with jam. The recipe is sound; most of the work of translation is in the units and in the oven.
- Half a pintCassell's is British, so this is an imperial half-pint: 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. The three tablespoons of cream are additional liquid, not part of it.
- Dessert-spoonfulsA dessert-spoon is two teaspoons, so three dessert-spoonfuls of ground rice is about 2 tablespoons. Slaking it in the cream first is what keeps it from seizing into lumps when it hits the boiling milk.
- Ground riceSold today as rice flour; the coarser "ground rice" still on British shelves is closer to the original and gives a very slightly grainy body. Either works, but rice flour sets a smoother pudding.
- Moderate ovenConventionally rendered today as about 350F, though a custard this lean does better nearer 325F. Much above that and the egg curdles at the edges and the pudding weeps as it cools.
- Cool before the eggs go inThe instruction to pour the rice mixture out to cool is the hinge. Beaten yolks stirred into a near-boiling base scramble on contact, and no amount of baking will bring the texture back.
- Three yolks, two whitesThe count is uneven, and the recipe does not explain why. The spare white is not used here.
- Lemon-rindPare it thin with a peeler so no white pith goes in. The recipe does not say when to remove it, but it should come out before the pudding goes into the dish. Three inches of peel from one lemon is about right.
- Time and yieldAbout 45 minutes, until the centre is set with only a faint tremble. The recipe promises no more than 'a small dish', so treat the number of servings as a guess; it must go completely cold and stiff before the jam is spread on.
Ground-rice puddings run right through nineteenth-century English cookery, cheap, gentle and much prescribed for invalids and children, and Cassell's costing of ninepence places this at the frugal end of the dessert list. The "Portuguese" tag is the interesting part: Victorian cookbooks used national labels loosely, and dishes named for Portugal generally lean on the country's reputation for egg-rich convent sweets — the doces conventuais built on surplus yolks, scented with lemon and cinnamon. The unequal count of yolks to whites here is a faint echo of that tradition, though the attribution is customary rather than documented, and no Portuguese original for this exact pudding is recorded. The apricot jam finish is thoroughly English, a way of dressing a plain baked custard for the table without further cooking.