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Rice Pudding
It is not generally known that the cheap broken rice is better for puddings than the more expensive article. One table-spoonful of this well washed, the usual quantity of milk and sugar, and a pinch of pounded mace, with a little butter, will make an excellent rice pudding. Bake very slowly.
A single short paragraph standing in for a whole method, so the useful work here is filling in what the original assumes every cook already knew. The hinge is the last line: a slow oven and a long stay in it are what turn a spoonful of rice and a lot of milk into something creamy rather than watery.
- "Bake very slowly"Read this as 275-300F for two to two and a half hours, uncovered. A hotter oven boils the milk, curdles it and sets the surface before the grains have swelled; the whole point of this style of pudding is slow absorption.
- "The usual quantity of milk" is genuinely vagueCassell's assumes the reader knows the house proportion. Victorian baked rice puddings generally run from 1 to 2 oz of rice per pint of whole milk; a single tablespoon of rice (about half an ounce) to a pint gives a very loose, custard-like pudding rather than a thick one. If you want the familiar spoonable texture, use more rice than the recipe states.
- Broken riceThis is milled rice fragments, once sold cheap as a byproduct and still found in South Asian and West African groceries. The claim in the recipe is sound: the broken grains release starch faster, so the milk thickens without the long simmering a whole grain needs. Short-grain pudding rice is the nearest supermarket substitute.
- SugarNo quantity is given. About 1 to 2 tablespoons per pint of milk suits most tastes; the pudding is meant to be mildly sweet, not a dessert custard.
- MacePounded mace means the dried outer covering of nutmeg, ground. It is milder and more floral than nutmeg itself. Ground mace from a jar works; use no more than a scant quarter teaspoon per pint or it dominates.
- The butterDot it over the surface rather than stirring it in. The slow oven gives baked rice pudding its browned skin, which boiled versions lack; the butter helps it colour.
- Whole milk mattersSkimmed or plant milks give a thin, slightly grainy result over this length of baking. Whole milk, or milk with a little cream added, is what the original assumes.
- YieldMade with a pint of milk it fits a 1-quart dish and gives about three small servings.
Baked rice pudding belongs to the long English tradition of milk puddings, and by the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the later nineteenth century it was firmly a household economy dish rather than a luxury — a shift from the spiced, egg-rich, sometimes meat-adjacent rice dishes of earlier centuries, when rice was an imported grocer's item sold by the ounce alongside the spices. The note about broken rice is characteristic of the book's practical streak: broken grain was a milling byproduct priced well below whole rice, and pointing out that it performs better in a pudding is exactly the kind of small domestic arbitrage these compendia liked to pass on. The pinch of mace looks back to the older, more heavily spiced versions of the dish, though nutmeg is the spice more usually met with in nineteenth-century English milk puddings.