Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rice and Milk
Rice and Milk
Wash a pound of rice, drain it, and simmer in five pints of water till it forms a thick paste. Stir it into a quart of milk, add treacle or sugar, with flavouring, or, if preferred, pepper and salt. Boil for a few minutes, and serve hot. Time, five minutes to boil the rice with the milk. Sufficient for half a dozen persons. Probable cost, 8d.
A plain milk-and-rice pottage of the sort Victorian cookery books offered as cheap bulk food. The proportions are generous and the method is forgiving, but the stated times need reading carefully.
- The times are not the whole timeThe "five minutes" refers only to the final boil after the milk goes in. Getting a pound of rice to a thick paste in five pints of water will take considerably longer, likely half an hour or more of slow simmering, depending on the grain.
- Use a pudding riceA short or medium grain breaks down and thickens as the recipe intends. Long-grain or basmati will stay separate and give you wet grains in milk rather than a paste.
- TreacleBlack treacle is broadly comparable to American molasses; golden syrup will give a milder, sweeter result if you prefer it. Start with two or three tablespoons for the full quantity and taste.
- Guard the bottom of the panOnce starch has thickened and milk is added, the mixture scorches easily and the burnt taste carries through everything. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat low, and stir across the base rather than around the sides.
- FlavouringThe book leaves this open: grated nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon zest or a bay leaf steeped in the milk are all period-appropriate. The savoury version with pepper and salt is worth taking seriously, and improves with a knob of butter.
- Quantities and costA quart is 40 fl oz imperial, about 5 cups; five pints is about 12 cups. Eightpence for six portions puts this firmly among the cheap dishes.
- ConsistencyIt thickens sharply as it cools and will set almost solid in the fridge. Thin with hot milk when reheating.
Rice boiled soft and finished with milk was one of the standard cheap fillers of nineteenth-century British cookery, sitting somewhere between a porridge and a pudding. Cheap imported rice, first from the East and later in bulk from Carolina and Burma, made this possible for ordinary households, and the treacle that sweetens it was the byproduct sugar of the poor, far cheaper than refined loaf sugar. The instruction to serve it either sweet or with pepper and salt reflects a period in which the sweet-savoury line was drawn less firmly than now, and the recipe carries the routine costing of its kind, "probable cost, 8d" for a dish feeding six.