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Old-Fashioned Rice Pudding
One-half cup of rice, wash it and put in baking dish with a little hot water and a pinch of salt. Fill up with cold milk. Let it simmer on the stove. Add one cup of sugar, and flavor with vanilla. When thick, bake in oven. Stir often while on stove.
— Mrs. Samuel Hopkins
A stovetop-then-oven rice pudding of the plainest sort, written for a cook who already knew what the finished thing should look like. The gaps are the milk quantity and the oven temperature.
- How much milk"Fill up with cold milk" assumes a specific dish the writer had in mind. For half a cup of raw rice, count on about 1 quart of whole milk, added in stages as the rice drinks it up; a second cup in reserve is worth having. Skim milk gives a thin, watery pudding.
- The riceUse a medium- or short-grain white rice — the starch is what thickens the pudding. Long-grain works but stays separate and loose, and converted or parboiled rice releases much less starch, giving a noticeably thinner result.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only "bake in oven." A modern low setting, around 300-325F, uncovered, for 45 minutes to an hour, should bring the top to a browned skin. Much hotter risks curdling the milk and drying the edges before the centre sets.
- Simmer, then bakeThe stovetop stage does the real cooking; the oven only finishes and browns. Keep the heat low and stir often, as instructed — rice settles and scorches on the bottom the moment it is left alone.
- The sugarOne cup to half a cup of rice is very sweet by current taste, and the sugar also slows the rice from softening. Half that amount is closer to modern palates, and adding it once the grains are tender speeds things along.
- VanillaStir it in at the end of the stovetop stage rather than early. Extract added to a long simmer loses most of its aroma before the dish ever reaches the oven.
- When it is "thick"Thicker on the stove than you want it finished — the rice keeps absorbing while it bakes and again as it cools. A pudding that looks correct going into the oven will come out stodgy.
- YieldAbout six modest servings. Good warm, and better cold the next day, when the skin firms and the grains go creamy.
Rice pudding in an American village cookbook of this period is a thrift dish first and a dessert second: a half cup of rice and milk enough to feed a table, with the oven doing the work while something else was being done. Milk-and-grain puddings run back through English cookery for centuries, and the baked version — rice, milk, sugar, a flavouring, no eggs — is often said to have been the everyday form, distinct from the richer custard-set puddings that called for half a dozen yolks. The instructions are bare: Mrs. Hopkins was writing for neighbours who had made rice pudding a hundred times and needed only to be reminded of her proportions and that she used vanilla.