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Rice Pudding, Boiled, Cheap
Wash a tea-cupful of rice, drain it, and put it into a dry, unfloured pudding-cloth. Gather the ends together, and tie them loosely, leaving room for the rice to swell to three times its size. Put it into a saucepan with plenty of fast-boiling water, and keep it boiling until done enough. If it is necessary to add more water, let it be boiling. When done enough turn it upon a dish, and send sweet sauce to table with it. A little may be poured round it in the dish. This pudding may be pleasantly varied by mixing with the rice half a cupful of washed currants, or sultana raisins, or prunes, or goose-berries, or apples, pared, cored, and quartered. It is well to place a plate under the pudding in the saucepan, to keep it from sticking. Time to boil, one hour and three-quarters. Probable cost, plain rice pudding, 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A pudding-cloth pudding of the plainest sort: rice, water and room to swell. The whole thing hinges on how loosely you tie the cloth.
- Tie loose, and mean itRice absorbs two to three times its volume of water, and a tightly gathered cloth will burst or produce a dense, gluey core. Leave the rice occupying no more than a third of the enclosed space.
- The clothUse unbleached calico, close-woven cotton or a doubled square of muslin, boiled first to remove dressing and sizing. The instruction to leave it "dry, unfloured" is deliberate — flour is used for suet and batter puddings to seal the cloth, and here it would only paste itself to the rice.
- A tea-cupfulTeacup measures were not standardised; reckon on something in the region of 5 to 7 oz of rice, roughly a cupful. The stated yield of five or six is generous by modern appetites; four is more realistic as a dessert course.
- Which riceVictorian books generally specified Carolina or Patna rice, both long-grained, Carolina being the type sold for puddings. Today any short- or medium-grain pudding rice works; long-grain basmati will not cohere into a turnable shape.
- TimingOne hour and three-quarters is long by any modern measure, but the rice is insulated by cloth and swelling slowly rather than simmering free in water. Check at 75 minutes by pressing the bundle; it should feel uniformly firm with no hard centre.
- Top up with boiling waterNot fussiness. Cold water drops the pot off the boil and the pudding stops cooking unevenly in the middle of its swell.
- The plate underneathAn inverted saucer or small heatproof plate keeps the cloth off the pan base, where it will scorch and stick. A metal trivet or a folded strip of foil does the same job.
- Fruit additionsCurrants, sultanas and quartered apples all behave. Gooseberries and prunes release a good deal of liquid inside the cloth and give a wetter, looser pudding — allow for it.
- Sweet sauceIn books of this period this usually means a simple pouring sauce: melted butter thickened with a little flour, sweetened and flavoured with lemon or nutmeg, or a thin custard. Golden syrup or warmed jam thinned with water is the modern shortcut.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth were the backbone of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and they survived into Cassell's day because they needed no oven — a single pot over a fire could produce a pudding, and cottages and lodging-house kitchens often had nothing else. The "cheap" in the title is doing real work: at a probable cost of twopence for five or six people, this is the economical cousin of the baked rice pudding enriched with milk, eggs and butter. Rice had been known in Britain since the medieval period, and its supply is often traced to the East India trade and later to the Carolinas, though the story is less tidy than that; in any case, by the mid-nineteenth century it was among the cheapest starches available, pressed into service by charitable kitchens and household manuals alike as a filling, unspoilable staple. The list of optional fruits — currants, sultanas, prunes, gooseberries, apples — is a fair index of what an ordinary English larder or garden could supply through the year.