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Rice Pudding, Baked, Plain
Put a small tea-cupful of rice into a dish, sprinkle a little sugar upon it, and add a little grated lemon-rind, or any other flavouring. Pour over it three pints of cold milk, and add a piece of fresh butter the size of a threepenny-piece. Put it in a very gentle oven, and bake until it is covered with a bright brown skin. A table-spoonful of currants may be added if liked. Time to bake, three hours (unless the oven is very gentle, the pudding will be dry and burnt). Probable cost 8d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A long, slow baked rice pudding of the old English kind: no eggs, no cream, just rice swelling in milk until the top sets into a brown skin. The instructions are sound; only the units and the oven need translating.
- The oven is the whole recipe"a very gentle oven" corresponds to something in the region of 250-300F (120-150C). The book's own parenthesis is the warning that matters: any hotter and the milk reduces faster than the rice can absorb it, and you get a dry, scorched pudding rather than a creamy one.
- Pints are imperial hereThree imperial pints is 60 fl oz, about 7 US cups or 1.7 litres. That is a great deal of milk to a few ounces of rice, which is right for this style; whole milk gives the best skin.
- The riceA "small tea-cupful" is perhaps 4-5 oz (120-150 g). Use short-grain pudding rice or arborio; long-grain will cook through but stays separate instead of going soft and starchy.
- The butterA threepenny-piece was a small silver coin about five-eighths of an inch across, so this is a knob of about 1/4 oz (5-7 g). It exists to enrich the skin, not the body of the pudding.
- Dish sizeYou need a wide, shallow ovenproof dish holding at least 2.5 litres, with the milk no more than about two inches deep. Depth of surface, not depth of pudding, is what produces the skin.
- StirringStir once or twice during the first hour to keep the rice from settling in a solid raft, then leave it strictly alone so the skin can form unbroken.
- Currants and flavouringStir currants in after the first hour, or they sit on top and burn. Grated lemon rind is the book's suggestion; a scrape of nutmeg over the surface is the other traditional finish.
- Yield and timingThree hours at 275-300F, serving five or six. It is done when the centre still wobbles slightly under the skin; it firms considerably as it cools and is good warm rather than hot.
Baked rice pudding of this sort belongs to the cheap end of Victorian domestic cookery, and the recipe gives the price away: eightpence to feed six, most of it the milk. Rice reached British kitchens as an expensive spiced luxury in the medieval period and had become a common domestic ingredient by the eighteenth century, cheaper still in the nineteenth, when imports from India and the Carolinas made it one of the cheapest starches available; the great milk-and-rice puddings of the period depended equally on a reliable supply of fresh milk. The near-absence of eggs and butter marks this as the "plain" version, apparently offered in contrast to richer custard-bound puddings, and the three-hour bake reflects a kitchen where a coal range was alight all day anyway and the coolest part of the oven cost nothing to use.