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Rice, Ground, Custard Pudding
Boil a pint of new milk with a bay-leaf, two or three bitter almonds, and a table-spoonful of brown sugar, for a quarter of an hour. Take two ounces of ground rice, and stir it into the milk by degrees; let it boil a few minutes longer until thick. Dip cups in cold water, and pour the mixture into them. Turn their contents out when cold, and serve with the following sauce. Take about half a pint of milk or cream, a little whole cinnamon, some lemon-peel, a bay-leaf, and enough brown sugar to sweeten. Boil the whole a quarter of an hour, and when cold add three beaten yolks of eggs. Put it on the fire again, but do not let it boil. Two minutes before lifting thicken with a little ground rice, and add a glass of Madeira or sherry. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
The reason this one is off the table is in the first line: bitter almonds, infused into hot milk and served to whoever is eating the pudding.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the almond's own enzymes convert to hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed and wetted. Steeping them in hot milk can release some of it, and although two or three almonds divided between several cups is a small quantity, children are considerably more vulnerable than adults. Their sale for domestic use is restricted or banned in many countries for this reason.
- No amount is a safe amount hereVictorian cookery generally treated bitter almonds as a flavouring to be used sparingly rather than as a poison to be avoided, though warnings about them are not unknown in the period. There is no quantity in this recipe that can be described as within range, so the recipe should not be scaled down or adjusted. Use a current ground-rice pudding recipe instead.
- What the almonds were doingThey were there for the intense marzipan-and-cherry note that we now associate with almond extract. Understanding that explains why so many nineteenth-century milk puddings, blancmanges and ratafias call for them, and why the flavour of period desserts is hard to reproduce faithfully.
- The sauce is a stirred custard"Put it on the fire again, but do not let it boil" is the hinge of the second half: three yolks in half a pint of liquid will curdle above roughly 180F. The ground rice added at the end is insurance, since starch stabilises the yolk proteins, but the sauce is still cooked below boiling and the bay leaf and lemon peel are infused into it as well.
- Units and quantitiesA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so a quarter more than a US pint. Two ounces of ground rice to that quantity of milk gives a set firm enough to turn out; the cups dipped in cold water are simply so the puddings release cleanly. As written it would fill three or four small cups.
- "Probable cost, 1s. 6d."The book costs its recipes in shillings and pence. The pudding base is cheap, and the glass of Madeira or sherry in the sauce is likely a substantial part of the eighteenpence.
Ground rice puddings belong to the large family of thickened milk dishes that filled the sweet course in middle-class Victorian households: cheap, filling, made from a pantry starch, and turned out of a mould so they could be presented as something more than nursery food. The pairing of milk, bay leaf and lemon peel is older than the book and reaches back through eighteenth-century English blancmanges to medieval almond-milk cookery, where almonds were a thickener and a flavour in their own right. Bitter almonds, sold by chemists and grocers alongside sweet ones, were the standard shortcut to that flavour throughout the nineteenth century; the shift to commercially prepared almond flavourings, and the tightening of rules on selling the bitter kernels, came later and is the main reason recipes like this one now read as period documents rather than working instructions. The Madeira or sherry in the sauce marks the dish as a dinner-table dessert rather than a children's pudding.