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Rice and Tapioca Pudding
Butter a pie-dish, and lay in it a tea-cupful of mixed rice and tapioca, a little more of the former than of the latter. Sprinkle over this two table-spoonfuls of powdered white sugar and a little grated nutmeg, and pour over it three pints of cold milk. Place a piece of butter the size of a fourpenny-piece on the top of the milk, and bake the pudding in a gentle oven. Time to bake, three or four hours. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A slow-baked nursery pudding of the plainest sort, and the proportions are the whole trick: a very small amount of grain to a great deal of milk, left alone for hours until the starch thickens it.
- Gentle ovenRead this as a slow oven, somewhere around 275-300F. The low heat lets the milk thicken without curdling or boiling over, which suits the three to four hours the recipe allows.
- A teacupfulA Victorian teacup is usually reckoned at about 5 fl oz (a quarter-pint), so roughly 4 to 5 oz of grain in total -- say 3 oz rice to 2 oz tapioca, keeping to the recipe's "a little more of the former than of the latter".
- Three pints of milkThese are imperial pints, so 60 fl oz, a little over 7 US cups. Whole milk will give a richer set than skim.
- Dish sizeThat much milk wants a roomy dish; about 3 quarts capacity leaves the 60 fl oz of milk well below the rim. A shallow modern pie plate will not hold it, though the deep Victorian pie-dish the recipe names would.
- The rice and the tapiocaUse short-grain pudding rice, not long-grain, and small pearl or granulated tapioca. Instant tapioca dissolves to slime long before the three hours are up.
- Butter the size of a fourpenny-pieceThe silver fourpence was a small coin, roughly dime-sized, so no more than a small knob of butter -- enough to gloss the surface and help the skin brown, nothing more.
- YieldSix modest servings, as stated. Serve warm; it stiffens considerably as it cools and is better reheated with a splash of extra milk.
Baked milk puddings of this kind were the backbone of Victorian nursery and invalid cookery: cheap, filling, requiring no attention once in the oven, and made almost entirely of ingredients a household already had. The tenpence quoted here for six people tells you the point plainly enough. Tapioca is starch extracted from the cassava root, generally traced to South America and reaching British kitchens in quantity through nineteenth-century colonial trade, where it was sold in pearls or flakes and prized for the slippery, translucent body it gives a pudding. Combining it with rice may well have been a thrift measure as much as a textural one -- the tapioca thickens the milk that the small quantity of rice alone could not, so a very little grain stretches across three pints. The method, at any rate, is the lesson: starch, milk, sugar and a slow oven.