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Rice Pudding-No. 2
1/2 cupful rice, 3/4 pint milk, 4 apples, peeled, cored, and stewed; 1/3 cupful sugar, 4 eggs. Boil rice in milk until reduced to pulp; beat well with apple sauce and sugar for ten minutes, then set aside to cool; then carefully mix in whites of eggs, whipped to stiff froth.
A soufflé-style rice pudding: stewed apple and cooked rice lightened with stiff egg whites. The hinge is temperature — the rice and apple base must be properly cold before the whites go in, or they collapse on contact and the pudding bakes dense.
- 3/4 pint milkOn an imperial pint of 20 fl oz this is 15 fl oz, a scant 2 cups; on a US pint of 16 fl oz it is 12 fl oz, or 1 1/2 cups. Whole milk gives the pulpy texture the recipe wants.
- The riceHalf a cup of raw short- or medium-grain rice, simmered gently in the milk until it breaks down to a thick porridge — 30 to 40 minutes, stirred often, with the heat low enough to avoid scorching on the base of the pan.
- Four apples, stewedRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of tart apples cooked down to a thick, dry sauce. Wet apple sauce will slacken the mixture and stop it rising; let it reduce, and drain it if it still weeps.
- The eggsFour eggs are listed but only the whites are used in the method. Either reserve the yolks for another dish, or beat them into the warm rice base before it cools for a richer set.
- Folding the whitesWhip to stiff but not dry peaks and fold in with a light hand in two or three additions. "Carefully mix" means fold, not beat — the whites are the only leavening here.
- Sugar and seasoningA third of a cup is modest by modern standards, and much depends on how tart the apples are. Taste the base before cooling; grated lemon zest, cinnamon or a little nutmeg all suit it.
- YieldFour to six servings. Good warm with cream, or cold, when it firms to something closer to a set rice cake.
Rice puddings run to many variants in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century compendia, which is presumably why they are numbered in books like this one. The plainest versions are rice, milk, sugar and a slow oven; this one belongs to the more ambitious end, where beaten whites lighten a nursery pudding towards something closer to a souffle. Stewed apple stretched the dish and added sweetness and acidity.