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Rice, Ground, Pudding
Mix two ounces of ground rice smoothly with a quarter of a pint of cold milk, heat three-quarters of a pint to boiling point, and stir into the rice. Put the mixture in an enamelled saucepan, and stir over the fire for about five minutes until the rice thickens, let it cool a few minutes, then add one ounce of butter, two ounces of pounded sugar, and the grated rind of half a lemon. Pour the mixture into a buttered pie-dish, and bake for half an hour. Probable cost, 6d.
A plain starch-set milk pudding, thickened on the stove before it ever sees the oven. The stovetop stage does the real work; the baking only browns the top and firms the surface.
- Ground rice is rice flourGround rice is rice ground to a powder -- not rice grains, and not the pudding rice used for baked rice pudding. It is usually a little coarser than modern rice flour, but rice flour, or a bag labelled "ground rice" in a South Asian grocery, will do; the finer the grind, the smoother the finish.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (about 150 ml) and three-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz (about 425 ml), since Cassell's pint is 20 fl oz. Using US pints will give you a noticeably stiffer pudding.
- The hinge: slake the rice coldThe whole point of mixing the ground rice with cold milk first is to disperse the starch before heat hits it. Tip it into hot milk dry and you get lumps that no amount of stirring will undo.
- Why enamelledEnamelled pans were recommended for milk and mildly acidic mixtures because bare iron or worn tinning could discolour or taint them. Any modern heavy-based stainless or nonstick pan is fine.
- Cool before the butterThe recipe has you let the mixture stand a few minutes off the heat before the butter, sugar and lemon go in; taking it off the boil helps the butter blend in rather than sitting as oil on top. Beat both in until smooth.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, which is caster sugar today. Granulated will work but may leave a slight grittiness in a pudding this smooth.
- Oven temperatureNone is given in the recipe. A moderate oven, around 350F (180C), for the half hour should set and lightly colour the top without curdling the milk.
- Yield and servingServes three, four at a stretch, in a small pie-dish of about a pint and a half. Good warm with stewed fruit or a spoonful of jam; it firms up as it cools.
Ground rice puddings sit in a long English line of milk-and-starch puddings that includes blancmange, semolina and sago, all of them ways of turning cheap milk into something substantial. Rice flour became widely available in Britain through the nineteenth-century trade in Indian and Carolina rice, and it appears constantly in Victorian cookery as a thickener for soups, moulds and invalid dishes because it was thought lighter on the stomach than wheat flour. The costing here is telling: sixpence for a family pudding. There are no eggs, so nothing binds it but the starch itself, and the lemon rind is doing the entire job of flavouring, a common economy in households where vanilla was expensive and citrus peel was free with the fruit.