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Rice Balls
Wash two cups of rice and put to cook in three pints of water, with a teaspoon of salt. Cook slowly for two hours and add more cold water if it boils dry. When done mould into cups and when cold turn out on a large plate. Take a tablespoon of rice out of the top of each ball and fill with some nice jelly, jam or preserve. Serve with sugar and whipped cream. MRS. A. C. FANCHER.
A plain nursery pudding that depends entirely on cooking the rice past the point most cooks would stop. The two-hour simmer is the recipe, not a typo.
- Why two hoursThe long slow cooking breaks the grains down so the mass sets firm enough to unmould. Rice cooked to fluffy separate grains, or a rice-cooker cycle, will collapse when turned out.
- Rice to chooseUse a short or medium-grain white rice; its higher amylopectin content gives the sticky set the recipe relies on. Long-grain converted rice will not hold a shape.
- LiquidThree pints is six cups to two cups of rice, a 3:1 ratio. Keep the heat very low and a lid ajar, and top up with cold water as directed rather than letting a crust form on the bottom.
- MouldingRinse the cups in cold water and pack the hot rice in firmly, then chill for at least two hours. Warm rice will not release cleanly; thoroughly cold rice turns out with a tap.
- Milk versionCooked in water and salt alone, the result is bland by modern taste. Rice puddings of the period were often made with part milk, so that change is in keeping with the style.
- YieldTwo cups of raw rice makes roughly six to eight cup-sized balls, depending on the cup used.
- Filling and servingAny thick preserve works, but a stiff jelly holds in the hollow better than a loose jam. Sweeten and whip the cream just before serving so it does not weep onto the plate.
Moulded rice puddings turned out cold and filled with preserves were often described as standard economical desserts: rice was cheap, shelf-stable and forgiving of long unattended cooking on a coal or wood range, and the dish used no eggs and no oven. Filling the hollow with "nice jelly, jam or preserve" points to a kitchen with its own put-up fruit on the shelf, which is what makes the recipe seasonal in practice even though it reads as year-round. The attribution to Mrs. A. C. Fancher is typical of the community cookbook form, which collected signed contributions from local women; the recipes assume shared knowledge and so leave out what everyone in that circle already knew, such as how firm the rice ought to feel before moulding.