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Rice Cooked in Milk
Rice cooked in milk is far more delicious than when cooked in the ordinary way. Cook in equal proportions of milk and water for at least an hour, add a pinch of salt, and be careful that it does not burn. A spoonful of jelly dropped on each dish when serving adds much to its delicacy.
— Mrs. Chas. J. Bagley
A method note rather than a measured recipe: no quantity of rice or liquid is given, only the ratio between milk and water and the hour of cooking.
- The proportions are missingThe receipt specifies only "equal proportions of milk and water" and gives no rice-to-liquid ratio. For long-grain white rice simmered this slowly, about 4 parts liquid to 1 part rice by volume is a workable starting point, topping up with hot milk if it tightens before the hour is out.
- Burning is the whole problemMilk solids catch on the bottom of the pan long before the rice is done, which is why the original warns about it. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, the lowest heat that keeps a bare tremble on the surface, and stir down to the metal every few minutes.
- An hour is for the rice of the periodPeriod domestic rice may well have been coarser or older stock than what is sold now. Modern long-grain will be soft in 25-35 minutes in milk; short-grain or pudding rice runs 35-45. Judge by grain, not by clock, and stop when the starch has thickened the milk to a loose cream.
- Salt timingAdding the pinch of salt at the start rather than partway through does no harm and seasons the grain more evenly.
- Not a baked puddingThis is a stovetop dish, closer to a plain rice porridge than to the baked rice pudding of the same era. There is no egg, no sugar and no oven involved.
- The jelly"A spoonful of jelly" means a firm fruit jelly — currant, quince, crabapple — spooned onto each serving so it slumps into the hot rice. A sharp jelly is the point against all that milk.
- YieldA cup of dry rice cooked this way gives four modest servings as a supper dish or breakfast.
Rice boiled in milk is a long-standing way of handling the grain in English and American kitchens, and it sits here as exactly the kind of thing a community cookbook collected: not a dish so much as a household correction, one woman telling her neighbours that the usual water-boiled rice is a waste of a good ingredient. Rice would have reached tables here as a shipped commodity rather than a local crop, which may be part of why it turns up in economical milk-and-water preparations — a small amount of an imported grain stretched with what the household already had. The spoonful of jelly points to a fruit-preserving culture: a household with tumblers of currant or crabapple jelly put by could drop one onto a plain hot dish at the table.