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Lemon Rice Pudding
To one quart of cold milk add two (small), level tablespoonfuls of rice, the grated rind of two lemons, and one-half cup of sugar. Let cook in double boiler until rice grains are well filled out and tender, then place in baking dish and bake for an hour, stirring the pudding a number of times meanwhile (even though a light brown skin forms repeatedly) till the last fifteen minutes, when it should be allowed to brown. Add more sugar if not sweet as desired on placing in oven. This will be creamy and delicate.
A very lean rice pudding: two tablespoons of rice to a quart of milk, cooked long enough for the starch alone to thicken it. The proportions look wrong to a modern eye and are not.
- The hinge: don't add riceTwo level tablespoons per quart is deliberate. The grains swell and burst over the long cooking and their starch thickens the milk into something between a pudding and a custard. Adding more rice moves it towards a thicker, grainier pudding rather than the promised creaminess.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A low oven, around 325F, suits it; a hot oven risks curdling the milk and setting the edges before the middle has thickened. If the top has not coloured by the final fifteen minutes, raising the heat or moving to an upper rack will help.
- MilkUse whole milk. There are no eggs and no cream here, so the body of the pudding comes from milk fat and rice starch alone; skim or low-fat milk gives a thin, watery result.
- Rind only, no juiceGrated zest carries the lemon oil without acid. Lemon juice added to hot milk will curdle it, so resist the temptation to squeeze in the fruit you have just grated.
- The double boiler stageExpect 45 minutes to an hour over simmering water before the grains are plump and tender. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir often, but the double boiler exists here to prevent a scorched milk skin at the bottom.
- Stirring in the skinThe instruction to stir the browned skin back in repeatedly is what makes the texture rich rather than merely milky. Stir every fifteen minutes or so, then leave it alone for the last quarter hour so a proper brown top can form.
- SugarHalf a cup for a quart of milk is on the modest side. Taste before it goes into the oven, as the recipe suggests, since that is the moment it directs you to adjust.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. It thickens further as it cools and is good warm or cold; serve in the baking dish, since it will not unmould.
Baked rice puddings of this kind were a standard of Anglo-American nursery and invalid cookery, valued because they needed almost no fat, no eggs and only a few pennies' worth of rice to turn a quart of milk into a substantial sweet. The lemon here is doing double duty: in the era before vanilla extract was cheap and universal, grated rind is often said to have been a common way to scent milk puddings. Recipes that specify grated rind rather than juice reflect a practical understanding, arrived at long before anyone spoke of casein and pH, that acid and hot milk do not agree. The long slow bake with the skin stirred back in is what coaxes creaminess out of so little rice.