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Rice Pudding, with Jam
Wash four ounces of rice, and drain it. Put it into a saucepan with a pint of milk, and let it simmer gently for half an hour. Add two ounces of fresh butter, and simmer again until it is quite soft. Pour it out, sweeten and flavour with any agreeable flavouring, and beat it up with two well-whisked eggs. Turn it into a plain mould well buttered, and bake in a gentle oven. Turn it out before serving, and garnish with any bright-coloured jam spread round or upon it. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for four persons.
A baked, moulded rice pudding rather than the loose nursery kind — the eggs set it firmly enough to turn out. Two things decide whether it succeeds: the rice must be genuinely soft before the eggs go in, and the pudding must be cool enough not to scramble them.
- Gentle ovenA gentle oven is roughly 300-325F. The pudding contains a high proportion of egg and milk and will curdle or weep if pushed much above 350F. The half hour given should suit a mould of about a pint and a half, which is roughly what this quantity makes; the centre should be just set with a slight wobble.
- Let it cool before the eggs"Pour it out" is doing real work here. Beat the eggs into the rice only once it has dropped to hand-warm, or they will set in threads before the pudding reaches the oven.
- Rice and liquidFour ounces is a scant two-thirds cup of rice; a pint is 20 fl oz in this book, so about 2½ cups. The original does not name a variety, but short- or round-grain pudding rice breaks down best; long-grain is less likely to collapse enough to hold the shape.
- SimmeringHalf an hour over the lowest heat, stirred often, then simmer again after the butter goes in until the rice is quite soft, which may take another ten minutes or more. The mixture should be thick and the grains collapsing. Add a splash more milk if it tightens before the rice is soft.
- Sweetening and flavouringThe original leaves both open: allow 2-3 tablespoons sugar, and grated lemon zest, a vanilla pod steeped in the milk, or a little nutmeg. Bitter almond flavouring was in use in this period — use vanilla or almond extract instead.
- Fresh butterThis meant unsalted, as distinct from the salted butter kept for cooking and keeping. Use unsalted; two ounces is 4 tablespoons.
- The mouldA "plain mould" is a smooth-sided charlotte tin or pudding basin with no fluting, so it releases cleanly. Butter it thoroughly and dust with caster sugar or fine crumbs. Rest the baked pudding 10 minutes before turning out, or it will slump.
- Yield and costFour servings, as stated. The 9d. is a Victorian price and no guide to anything now.
Rice pudding in Britain began as a rich, spiced, banquet-scale dish — medieval and Tudor versions bound ground rice with almond milk, marrow or cream — and only became household economy once cheap rice arrived in quantity through the East India trade and, later, Carolina and Burmese imports. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the 1870s, several distinct treatments were in circulation: the slow oven-baked pudding with skin, the boiled ground-rice mould, and this middle course, where the rice is cooked on the stove and then set with egg so it can be unmoulded and dressed like an entremets. The jam border is the giveaway that this is meant for the table rather than the nursery: red currant, raspberry or apricot preserve supplied the colour that a pale moulded pudding lacks, a trick used all through nineteenth-century service. The recipe is really a lesson in binding a starch with egg and getting it out of a mould intact.