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Pudding-Pies
Put a pint of milk into a saucepan with a little thin lemon-rind, mix with it two ounces of ground rice, and keep it stirred over the fire until it is thick and free from lumps. Pour it into a bowl, stir into it a piece of butter the size of a walnut, and add a pinch of salt, two table-spoonfuls of white sugar, a little grated nutmeg, two eggs, and a heaped table-spoonful of currants. Stir the rice occasionally until it is cold. Line some large patty-pans with good pastry rolled very thin, three-parts fill them with the mixture, and bake in a gentle oven. These puddings may be made larger by increasing the quantities in the proper proportion, and richer by putting in a little more butter and an additional egg or two. If liked, the currants can be strewed over the pudding-pies just before they are put into the oven instead of being stirred into the other ingredients. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian rice-custard tartlet, straightforward once the archaic vessels and oven language are translated. The one thing to get right is the temperature of the rice when the eggs go in.
- Cool the rice before the eggsThe recipe adds butter and then eggs to freshly thickened rice, which will scramble them if the pan has just come off the heat. Let the mixture drop to no more than hand-warm, beat the eggs separately, then stir them in.
- Ground riceA coarse meal of milled rice, still sold as "ground rice"; fine rice flour is the nearest substitute. It is not cooked rice or pudding rice. Two ounces to a pint of milk gives a thick, spoonable paste that stiffens further as it cools.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins. A bun or shallow tartlet tin lined with thin shortcrust is the closest modern equivalent; the recipe specifies "large" patty-pans but gives no size.
- A gentle ovenA slow to moderate oven, somewhere around 300-325F (150-165C): hot enough to set the custard and colour the pastry without the filling puffing and cracking.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly half an ounce to an ounce, about a tablespoon. The suggested "richer" version with more butter and one or two extra eggs turns the filling into something much closer to a baked custard.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Strewing them on top rather than stirring them in, as the recipe offers, keeps them from sinking to the pastry base.
- TimingA quarter of an hour suits small tartlets; test with the tip of a knife, which should come out clean, and the centre should barely wobble. Larger tins will need appreciably longer, and blind-baking the cases first prevents a soggy bottom that the original does not warn about.
- Quantities and yieldA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz (568 ml), so a little under 2.5 US cups of milk. The recipe gives no tartlet count, only "sufficient for five or six persons"; the "probable cost, 9d" is a household-accounts figure of the period.
Pudding-pies of this kind belong to a long English tradition of baking a thickened milk pudding inside a pastry case rather than in a dish. The best-documented survivor is the Kentish pudding pie, still associated with Lent and Easter in that county, made with ground rice or semolina, currants and nutmeg in much the same proportions given here; the connection to Lent is traditional rather than firmly dated. Cassell's places the recipe among its rice and milk puddings, and ground rice was cheap, kept well and stretched a pint of milk into a dish for six; the work routinely gives a "probable cost" in pence. The instruction to infuse the milk with thin lemon-rind and finish with grated nutmeg is standard Victorian custard flavouring, and nutmeg was a common household spice for milk-based dishes.