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Rice Tart
Wash a small tea-cupful of rice, and simmer it with a quart of milk until it is tender. Beat it well, and mix with it a pinch of salt, a little sugar, a flavouring of nutmeg, cinnamon, or lemon, and three eggs. Line a pie-dish with good pastry, spread the rice upon it, and bake in a quick oven. Before serving, sprinkle the surface with sifted sugar. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A rice pudding baked in a pastry case, from a period when the two ideas were interchangeable. The only real difficulty is heat management: pastry wants a hot oven, egg-thickened rice does not.
- The hinge: cool the rice before the eggs go inSimmered rice straight off the stove will scramble three beaten eggs on contact. Let it drop to warm, then beat the eggs in gradually.
- A small teacupful of riceVictorian teacups ran smaller than modern mugs; read this as a generous 1/2 cup (about 100 g) of short-grain pudding rice. Long-grain will work but stays in separate distinct grains rather than going creamy.
- A quart of milkAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, so about 5 US cups. The rice swells and the milk reduces during the simmer; expect roughly 30-40 minutes over low heat with regular stirring, though the recipe gives no time for this stage, only "until it is tender".
- "Beat it well"This breaks the cooked grains down into a thick, cohesive mixture that the eggs can then set. Work it hard with a wooden spoon.
- A quick ovenConventionally reckoned somewhere around 400-450F. Reasonable for the pastry, punishing for a custard, so a modern cook may prefer to blind-bake the lined dish for 15 minutes at that heat, then fill it and drop the oven to about 350F for the half hour given; the original prescribes neither step. The filling is done when it is set at the edges with a slight wobble at the centre.
- A little sugarUndefined, as usual. Two to three tablespoons suits the quantity of milk here; the finishing sugar adds more.
- Sifted sugarFine white sugar put through a sieve, i.e. caster or finely powdered sugar. Sprinkled on while the tart is still hot it will dissolve into a damp glaze, so it is better added once the surface has cooled.
- Yield and costThe original gives five or six portions and a probable cost of 1s 2d; no dish size is specified.
Rice tarts of this kind sit at the meeting point of two older English habits: the medieval and Tudor taste for sweetened rice thickened with eggs and spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, and the enduring assumption that any pudding worth eating is better inside pastry. Rice reached British kitchens as an expensive imported grocery, sold by the pound alongside spices, and it was only in the nineteenth century, as shipments from India and the American South drove the price down, that rice pudding became the cheap nursery staple it is remembered as. The recipe demonstrates a technique rather than a luxury: a starch cooked in milk, enriched with egg, and set by baking. Costings in shillings and pence are printed for every recipe in the book, which was a household manual aimed at readers who had to answer to a weekly budget.