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Rice Pudding, Dutch
Soak four ounces of rice in warm water half an hour, then drain the water from it, and throw the rice into a stewpan, with half a pint of milk, half a stick of cinnamon, and simmer till tender. When cold, mix four whole eggs well beaten, with a slice of butter melted in a tea-cupful of cream (or milk where cream is scarce or dear), and three ounces of sugar, a quarter of a nutmeg, a good piece of lemon-peel, and the rice. Put a light puff-paste or grated tops and bottoms into a mould or dish, spread the rice on this, and bake in a quick oven.
A rice custard baked in a pastry case rather than the loose, spoonable nursery pudding the name suggests. The main thing the original leaves out is that the custard needs gentler heat than the crust.
- The hinge: oven heatA "quick oven" is usually reckoned at around 400-450F, which suits the pastry but risks curdling an egg-and-cream custard into something weeping and grainy. Bake at 350F until the centre is just set with a slight wobble, roughly 40-50 minutes, and blind-bake the pastry first if you want a crisp base.
- Half a pint of milkIn an imperial book that is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. It is a tight amount of liquid for 4 oz of rice, so use a heavy pan, the lowest heat, and stir often; the rice should absorb nearly all of it.
- Four ounces of riceWeight, not volume: about 2/3 cup of raw short- or medium-grain rice. Pudding rice or Arborio gives the creamy result intended. Long-grain stays separate and makes a thinner, patchier custard.
- A teacupfulVictorian teacups run about 5-6 fl oz, so read it as roughly 2/3 cup of cream or milk. The "slice of butter" is usually taken as about 1 oz.
- Tops and bottomsThese were hard-baked rusks sold for teething infants, grated to a coarse crumb and used to line a dish. Dried breadcrumbs or crushed rusk do the same job: they absorb stray moisture and keep the base from going soggy.
- Nutmeg and lemon peelA quarter of a whole nutmeg is roughly 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated. "A good piece of lemon-peel" means pared zest with no white pith, and it is worth infusing it in the hot milk with the cinnamon and lifting both out before the eggs go in, since nobody wants to bite a bay-hard strip of peel.
- Order of workThe instruction to cool the rice before adding eggs is not optional. Warm rice will scramble them; let it come down to lukewarm at least.
- YieldProbably enough for an 8- or 9-inch pie dish, serving about six, though the original specifies neither. Good warm, better at room temperature once the custard has firmed.
Cassell's, in a habit often said to be common in late-Victorian compendia, used national labels loosely: "Dutch" here signals the enriched, pastry-lined, tart-like treatment rather than the plain boiled rice pudding of the English nursery, and it may be read alongside the Low Countries' long habit of baking sweetened rice in a crust, of which the Limburg rijstevlaai is the best-known survivor, though no line of descent can be shown. Rice reached British kitchens as a colonial import and was cheap enough by the 1870s to be a staple of household economy; the recipe, for its part, casually offers milk "where cream is scarce or dear" and leans on grated rusks as a substitute for a full pastry case. The presence of cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon peel together is characteristic of the period, when the spice cupboard was still doing the work that vanilla extract would later take over.