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Rice Pudding-No. 1
1/2 cupful rice, 1 1/2 pints milk, 1/2 cupful sugar, large pinch salt, 1 tablespoonful lemon rind chopped fine. Put rice (washed and picked), sugar, salt, and milk in quart pudding-dish; bake in moderate oven two hours, stirring frequently first hour and a half; then permit it to finish cooking with light-colored crust, disturbing it no more. Eat cold with cream.
An unusually lean baked rice pudding — no eggs, no butter, no spice beyond lemon — that relies entirely on slow oven time to turn rice and milk into custard. Two details in the original need attention before you start.
- The lemon rindIt appears in the ingredient list but never in the method. Stir it in with the rice and milk at the start; two hours in the oven will carry the oil through the whole dish. A tablespoon of finely chopped zest is roughly the peel of one large lemon.
- Measures1 1/2 pints is 3 cups of milk by US measure. Use whole milk; lower-fat milk gives a thin, watery set.
- Oven'Moderate' in books of this period is usually reckoned somewhere between 325F and 375F. At the low end, 325F, the milk is less likely to catch at the edges over so long a bake, and the two hours still hold.
- The riceUse ordinary long- or medium-grain white rice. Not instant, not parboiled, and not a rinsed-away starch — the starch is the only thickener here. "Washed and picked" meant removing grit and hulls from unprocessed rice; a rinse is enough today, and you can skip even that.
- The stirringThis is the hinge. Frequent stirring for the first ninety minutes keeps the grains suspended and dissolves starch into the milk; leaving it alone for the last half hour is what forms the skin. Stir at the end and you get no crust and a broken texture.
- Dish sizeA quart dish is tight for 3 cups of milk plus swelling rice. Use a 1 1/2-quart shallow baker and stand it on a sheet pan to catch boil-over in the first hour.
- Doneness and yieldIt should still look slightly loose coming out — it sets considerably as it cools. Serves four, and the instruction to eat it cold with cream is worth following: warm, it tastes thin.