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Rice and Apricot Pudding
Wash one pound of rice. Drain it, and put it into a saucepan with three pints of boiling milk, a slice of fresh butter, and three table-spoonfuls of sugar. Let it simmer gently for an hour. Pour it out, and when it is partially cooled stir into it three well-beaten eggs. Take a dozen and a half of preserved apricots. Halve them, simmer them in a little thin syrup for five minutes, and drain them. Butter a plain pudding mould, and sprinkle bread-crumbs over the butter. Place in the mould a layer of rice an inch thick. Put on this some pieces of apricot, and fill the mould with alternate layers of rice and fruit. Bake the pudding in a moderately-heated oven. When it is done enough, turn it out carefully, and serve with a good custard poured round it. If preferred, other fruits may be used instead of apricots. Pineapple or apple are especially suitable. Time to bake, about an hour. Probable cost, varying with the price of fruit. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A moulded, turned-out rice pudding rather than the loose baked kind — the stiff rice-to-milk ratio is deliberate, because the pudding has to hold its shape on the dish.
- The hinge: cool before the eggsThe rice must be only warm, not hot, when the beaten eggs go in, or they scramble into threads. Spread it in a wide bowl for ten minutes and stir the eggs in off the heat.
- Imperial measuresThree imperial pints is 60 fl oz, about 1.7 litres — roughly 7.2 US cups, not 6. With a pound (450 g) of rice this gives a very thick mass, which is what makes the mould turn out cleanly.
- The riceUse a short or round-grain pudding rice; long-grain will not break down enough to bind. Stir occasionally over the hour of gentle simmering to stop it catching.
- "A moderately-heated oven""A moderately-heated oven" is usually taken as about 325-350F / 165-175C. An hour at that temperature sets the custard through the depth of a mould; a hotter oven curdles the egg at the edges before the centre firms.
- Preserved apricotsThese are whole fruit put up in sugar syrup, not dried apricots and not jam. Tinned apricot halves in syrup are the closest equivalent; drain them and give them the five-minute simmer only if they are firm.
- Turning it outLet the pudding stand 10-15 minutes out of the oven before inverting. The buttered-and-crumbed mould is the release mechanism, so be thorough about both, into every flute if the mould is patterned.
- Yield"Half a dozen persons" is optimistic by modern appetites in one direction and generous in another — a pound of rice and three pints of milk will comfortably serve eight to ten as dessert.
- The custardNo recipe is given because Cassell's assumes a separate pouring custard: egg yolks, sugar and milk stirred over low heat until it coats a spoon. Make it thin enough to pool around the base.
Moulded rice puddings belong to the Victorian dinner table, where a sweet course was expected to arrive as an object — domed, patterned, standing on its own with a sauce poured around it rather than over it. That ambition explains the proportions here: far more rice than a nursery pudding needs, cooked until it will hold a shape, bound with egg and layered with fruit so that each slice shows a cross-section. Preserved apricots were a staple of the well-stocked Victorian store cupboard, bottled at home in summer or bought in glass or tin, and Cassell's readiness to substitute pineapple — an expensive imported luxury for most of the century, increasingly available tinned by the time this dictionary appeared — is a small marker of how the fruit trade was changing.