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Rice and Cocoa-Nut Pudding
Wash and pick four ounces of rice, and soak in cold water till the grains are soft. Put two ounces of desiccated cocoa-nut in a basin, pour over it half a pint of boiling water, cover it with a plate, and let it stand for an hour or longer. Strain the cocoa-nut extract, throwing away the dry residuum; boil the rice in the cocoa-nut water until quite tender, mix in three ounces of sugar, and a few grains of aniseed, and bake for twenty minutes in a well-buttered pudding-dish. Probable cost, 6d.
A plain milkless rice pudding that gets all its richness from a coconut infusion. The hinge is the liquid: half a pint of imperial measure is barely enough to cook 4 oz of rice, so treat the quantity as a starting point rather than a rule.
- Weights and volumes4 oz rice is about 115 g, a generous half cup; 2 oz desiccated coconut is about 55 g, roughly two-thirds of a cup loosely packed; 3 oz sugar is about 85 g. Half a pint in a British book of this date is 10 fl oz, not 8.
- The coconut waterTen fluid ounces of infusion will be largely absorbed by the soaked rice and will reduce further as it simmers. Have a further half cup of hot water or milk to hand and add it as needed so the rice cooks tender rather than catching on the pan.
- Do not throw the residue awayThe instruction to discard the strained coconut may reflect a coarser, drier product than we buy now. Modern fine desiccated coconut softens well, and leaving it in the pudding gives more flavour and body; strain only if you want a smooth texture.
- Coconut milk insteadHalf a pint of tinned coconut milk, or coconut milk diluted with water, does the same job as the infusion and does it better. Unsweetened is what you want, since the sugar is added separately.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Twenty minutes is a setting-and-browning stage for rice that is already cooked, so a moderate oven of 350F (180C) is right; 400F if you want more colour on top.
- Aniseed"A few grains" means just that: a few seeds, lightly crushed. It is assertive; add less than you think, and taste the rice before it goes in the dish.
- Soaking the ricePudding rice or another short grain is probably what is intended, though the recipe does not say. It gives no time either, only "till the grains are soft"; an hour in cold water is enough for the grains to swell.
- YieldServes three to four as a modest pudding. It is fairly lean by rice-pudding standards, so a spoonful of cream or a little jam is not out of place.
Desiccated coconut was a late nineteenth-century convenience, shipped dried and shredded and sold in packets when whole nuts were still an occasional treat, and cookery writers of the period were quick to use it as a flavouring rather than a texture. The method here "\\— pour boiling water over the shreds, steep, strain, discard the solids "\\— is a household approximation of coconut milk, close to the way coconut is often said to have been used in the tropical kitchens the ingredient came from. This is an economy pudding, priced at sixpence and built without a drop of dairy, of the kind useful when milk was expensive, unreliable in hot weather, or simply not in the house. Aniseed as the seasoning, rather than the nutmeg or lemon peel that dominates English rice puddings, may hint at a borrowed ancestry.