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Rice, Buttered
Wash four ounces of rice, drain it, and put it into a saucepan with a pint and a half of milk. Let it simmer gently until the grains are tender. Pour off the thick milk, and put in two ounces of butter, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and a little grated nutmeg, or any other flavouring. Stir the rice until the butter is melted and the rice is equally flavoured, turn it upon a dish, and serve very hot. Time, about one hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain milk-simmered rice pudding finished on the stovetop rather than baked. The instructions are sound; only the units and the timing need translating.
- Weights and volumesFour ounces of rice is a scant 2/3 cup of long or medium grain; a pint and a half in an English book means 30 imperial fl oz, or about 3 1/2 US cups of milk. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons.
- The hinge: low heat, lidded, no stirringMilk scorches on the bottom of the pan long before rice softens. Use the heaviest saucepan you own, keep the surface at a bare tremble, and resist stirring until the butter goes in — stirring releases starch and turns the dish gluey.
- The hour is generousModern white rice in this much milk is tender in 30 to 40 minutes. Pudding rice or Arborio will take longer and drink more milk; long-grain will be done sooner and stay looser.
- "Pour off the thick milk"What you drain is the reduced, starchy milk, and it is worth keeping rather than discarding — it can be poured back a spoonful at a time if the finished rice tightens up on the way to the table. Drain only what does not cling; the rice should be creamy, not dry.
- NutmegGrate it fresh at the end. Pre-ground nutmeg loses much of its aroma in storage and will read as dusty in a dish this plain.
- Other flavouringsPeriod books commonly use a strip of lemon peel or a piece of cinnamon bark dropped into the milk at the start, or a spoonful of orange-flower or rose water stirred in at the end.
- YieldFive or six as written, though the portions are small by modern standards — closer to four dessert servings. It sets firm as it cools, so serve it straight from the pan.
Rice boiled in milk with butter and sugar is one of the oldest sweet uses of rice in English cookery, predating the baked, egg-thickened rice pudding that most people now picture; medieval and early modern versions appear under names like rys or rice cream, often thickened with almond milk during fasts. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the later nineteenth century, rice had become cheap enough — much of it arriving through the Carolina and later the East Indian trades — that a dish like this cost eightpence and fed six, which is precisely why it sits in a book aimed at households counting the cost of every dish. The stovetop method here belongs to a family of "buttered" preparations in Victorian books, where the word indicates simply that the dish is enriched with butter, and it has an obvious resemblance to the Scandinavian and Central European traditions of buttered milk rice served with cinnamon sugar.