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RICE PUDDING, RICH (Soyer's recipe)
Put half a pound of washed rice into a stewpan, with three pints of milk, one pint of water, three ounces of sugar, the peel of one lemon, one ounce of fresh butter; boil gently for half an hour, or until the rice is tender; add four eggs well beaten, mix well, and bake quickly for half an hour, and serve. The pudding may be steamed if preferred.
Soyer's version is a stovetop rice porridge enriched with eggs and then finished in a hot oven, which is why it comes out creamy rather than dry. The whole recipe hinges on the moment the eggs go in.
- Add the eggs off the heatPull the pan from the burner and let the rice stop steaming before beating in the eggs, then stir constantly as you add them. Beaten eggs dropped into rice at a boil will scramble into threads and no amount of baking will smooth them out.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pints are imperial: 20 fl oz each, so three pints of milk is about 7 1/4 US cups and the pint of water about 2 1/2 cups. Half a pound of rice is roughly 1 1/8 cups uncooked.
- "Bake quickly"No temperature is given; "quickly" is generally read as a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Half an hour there sets the egg and browns the top; the rice is already tender from the stewpan stage, so the oven is doing colour and structure rather than cooking the grain.
- The riceUse a short- or medium-grain white rice, the sort sold for rice pudding or risotto. Parboiled or converted rice will not release enough starch to thicken the milk, and long-grain stays separate rather than creamy.
- Lemon peelPare the zest off in wide strips with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, and fish the strips out before the eggs go in. Grated zest can be left in but will speckle the pudding.
- Vessel and depthBoil in a heavy pan of at least 4 quarts, since the milk will climb. For baking, transfer to a buttered dish of about 2 1/2 to 3 quarts; a shallow dish gives more browned top, a deep one more creamy interior.
- If steamingSteamed, the pudding wants a covered buttered basin and about an hour and a quarter over gently simmering water. It will set paler and softer, with no skin.
- YieldGenerous for eight as written. It is good warm, and thickens considerably on cooling.
Alexis Soyer (1810-1858) was the French-born chef of the Reform Club in London, better known to the wider public through his cheap cookery books and his work feeding the destitute in Ireland during the Famine and the troops in the Crimea. Recipes credited to him circulated freely in later Victorian compilations such as Cassell's, and this one is characteristic: an ordinary nursery pudding raised by richer proportions of milk, butter and egg, and by cooking the rice properly on the stove before it ever sees the oven. The two-stage method "rich" rice puddings share with this one is the point of difference from the plainer sort, where uncooked rice and milk are simply left in a slow oven for two or three hours. Rice was cheap and imported in quantity by the mid-nineteenth century, which is why the puddings appear across the whole range of British cookery books, from workhouse dietaries to club kitchens.