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Vanilla Snow Pudding
1 cup rice 5 cups salted water.
Boil for 20 minutes, then add ½ cup sweet cream, ½ cup sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites of 2 eggs.
Flavour with vanilla. Pile on dish and serve cold.
A plain boiled rice pudding lightened with beaten whites rather than baked custard. Two things in the original need decoding: the rice is cooked in a large excess of water, and the whites are folded into a mixture that is still hot.
- Cook the rice like pastaFive cups of water to one cup of rice is far more than the grain will absorb, so the rice boils loose in salted water; the recipe does not say so, but the excess liquid will need draining or cooking off before the cream and sugar go in. Twenty minutes suits a medium- or long-grain white rice and gives soft, separate grains rather than the creamy mass of a baked pudding.
- Sweet creamThis means fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream that older kitchens also kept on hand. Any cream from light to heavy works; heavy cream gives a richer result.
- Fold while hot, serve coldStir the cream, sugar and butter into the hot rice so the butter melts and the sugar dissolves, then fold the whites in at once. Folding into a cold, stiff mass will simply knock the air out.
- The egg whitesThey are never cooked beyond whatever heat the hot rice gives them, which is not reliable pasteurisation. Use cartoned pasteurised whites if the pudding is for children, the elderly or anyone pregnant.
- Vanilla quantityNo amount is given. One teaspoon of extract is right for this volume; alternatively a split vanilla bean can be simmered with the rice and removed before the cream goes in.
- Pile on dishThe pudding is meant to be heaped into a mound on a serving plate or shallow bowl while still soft, then chilled until set. It firms considerably as it cools, so mound it higher than looks sensible.
- YieldRoughly six servings. It is a plain sweet, and takes well to a fruit sauce, stewed rhubarb or a spoonful of jam alongside.
Rice puddings of this kind sat squarely in the economical end of the dessert repertoire: a cup of rice, a little sugar and two eggs feed a family, and the technique needs nothing but a pot. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the telegraphic style here — the contributor assumed her reader already knew how to boil rice and beat whites. The "snow" in the name refers only to the beaten whites folded through, a trick often connected with the older family of snow puddings set with gelatine; here the rice does the work of body and the whites supply lightness and the pale colour.