Home › Puddings › Poor Man's Rice Pudding
Poor Man's Rice Pudding
1 cup rice 1/4 cup sugar 1 qt. milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon Pick over and wash the rice; mix all the ingredients and bake very slowly for three or four hours in a well buttered pudding dish. Keep covered until the last fifteen minutes, when the pudding may be browned on top. Stir twice during the first hour of cooking. It should be creamy and not dry when done. Grated orange peel may be substituted for cinnamon.
A baked rice pudding with no eggs and no cream — the milk and starch do all the work. The method is unfussy but the oven temperature and the rice-to-milk ratio decide whether it comes out creamy or stodgy.
- Oven temperature"Very slowly" in a book of this vintage is usually taken to correspond to a slow oven, roughly 275-300F. Much hotter and the milk is liable to boil, curdle at the edges and set long before three hours are up.
- The ratio is denseOne cup of raw rice to one quart of milk is a high proportion by modern standards; many baked rice puddings today use nearer a third to a half cup of rice per quart. Expect a thick, close-textured pudding rather than a loose one. If you want it soupier, hold back rice rather than adding milk, or have extra warm milk ready to stir in near the end.
- Which riceUse ordinary medium- or long-grain white rice. Parboiled (converted) rice will never break down into creaminess, and instant rice will disintegrate. Short-grain pudding rice gives the best result of all.
- Which milkWhole milk. Skim or 2% will not carry three hours in the oven without going thin and slightly grainy, and there is no egg or cream here to make up for it.
- "Pick over"An instruction from the days when rice arrived with grit and hulls in it. Bagged rice today needs only the rinse the recipe already calls for.
- The stirringThe two stirs in the first hour matter more than they sound: they redistribute rice that has sunk and break the skin before it sets hard. After the first hour, leave it alone so the top can form.
- Covering and browningCover with a lid or foil for the bulk of the baking, then uncover for the last fifteen minutes as the recipe directs. A broiler will colour it quickly, but watch it closely - the sugary surface can go from gold to scorched in moments.
- Doneness and yieldIt is done when the rice is soft and there is still visibly loose milk around it; it firms considerably as it cools. The recipe gives no yield; a quart of milk plus a cup of rice needs about a 2-quart dish and will serve roughly six.
- The orange variationGrated zest only, from an unwaxed orange, and stirred in at the start so it perfumes the milk through the long bake. Pith turns bitter over three hours.
"Poor man's" here appears to mean eggless. A proper baked rice pudding of the period was enriched with eggs, sometimes cream and raisins, and the frugal version dropped them and let time in a cool oven do the thickening instead — starch from the rice standing in for custard. That is a household economy that predates this book by centuries, but it survives here because milk puddings were the standard nursery and everyday supper sweet in American and British homes well into the twentieth century, cheap enough to make often and slow enough to sit in the residual heat of a range that was lit all day for other reasons.