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Rice Pudding
3 tablespoons rice 1 pint milk 1 cup water Butter size of an egg ½ cup sugar ½ teaspoon cinnamon (or nutmeg) Pinch of salt.
Note-Raisins may be added.
Put in oven and bake 2 hours-don't disturb the rice. Take out and on top spread an icing made as follows: 2 eggs (whites) 1 cup sugar
A slow-baked rice pudding of the plainest kind, printed here among the boiled puddings although it goes into the oven. The whole method rests on leaving it alone.
- Don't disturb the riceThe instruction is the recipe. Three tablespoons of raw rice in three cups of liquid only works because the grains swell slowly and undisturbed while a skin forms on top. Stirring breaks the skin and releases starch, giving a gluey pudding instead of a set custard with distinct grains.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the recipe uses no oven term either. Two hours for this quantity of milk suggests a slow oven; around 300F is a reasonable modern guess, in a buttered shallow dish of about 1 to 1.5 quarts. Much hotter and the milk is liable to boil over the edges and catch before the rice is tender.
- Butter size of an eggA standard old measure: about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Dot it over the surface rather than stirring it in.
- The rice itselfUse ordinary long or medium grain white rice, unrinsed. Parboiled or instant rice will not absorb liquid over two hours in the same way, and brown rice will not soften enough.
- A pint of milkIf the pint is an imperial one, as it may well be in a Canadian book of this period, it is 20 fluid ounces, nearer 2.5 cups than 2. Whole milk; skim gives a thin, watery set.
- The icingTwo whites beaten stiff with a cup of sugar is a meringue, and it is very sweet by modern taste; half that sugar is plenty. Spread it on the pudding while hot and return it to a moderate oven for 10 to 15 minutes until set and lightly coloured. The original does not say to bake it, but an unbaked meringue on cooling pudding stays raw and weeps.
- RaisinsIf adding them, scatter them in at the start rather than later, and expect them to sink.
- YieldFour modest servings. Serve warm; it firms as it cools.
Baked rice pudding of this type -- rice, milk, sugar, a knob of butter and a grating of nutmeg, left in a cooling oven for hours -- is among the long-established forms of English domestic cookery, and is generally traced to the sweetened milk pottages of the medieval kitchen, when rice was an expensive imported good. By the time the Five Roses book was assembled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume for its flour, rice was cheap and the pudding was a household economy dish: it needed almost no attention, no flour, and it could use the heat of a wood or coal range that was already lit. Its placement under "Boiled Puddings" despite the baking instruction appears to be an editorial slip in a collection gathered from many contributors. The meringue top marks it as a slightly dressier version.