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Poor Man's Pudding
4 cups milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup rice 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/3 cup molasses 1 tablespoon butter Wash rice, mix and bake same as Rice Pudding. At last stirring, add butter.
A baked rice pudding sweetened with molasses instead of sugar, and thickened by long slow cooking rather than by eggs. The whole method rests on one thing: low heat and time.
- The ovenThe recipe gives no temperature, deferring to the Rice Pudding entry; a slow oven, around 300F in modern terms, suits it. Much hotter and the milk scorches at the edges before the rice has swollen; the starch needs a long, gentle cook to thicken the milk.
- TimingReckon on 2 1/2 to 3 hours uncovered, though the recipe gives no time. The pudding is done when the rice is soft, the milk has reduced to a thick creamy body, and a brown skin has set on top.
- StirringStir every 30 minutes for the first two hours, folding the browned skin back in each time -- this is what makes the pudding creamy and streaked with colour. Leave the last hour undisturbed so a final skin forms. The butter goes in at that last stirring, as directed.
- The riceUse a short or medium grain white rice, not converted or parboiled, which will not release enough starch. Do not rinse away more than the loose surface dust.
- MolassesUnsulphured molasses is the closest match to what the book intends. Blackstrap is far more bitter and will dominate; if that is all you have, cut it with a spoonful of brown sugar.
- The dishUse a 2-quart baking dish, buttered, and stand it on a sheet pan -- 4 cups of milk plus rice rises as it cooks and can weep over the rim early on.
- YieldServes 5 or 6 as written. Good warm rather than hot, with cream poured over.
"Poor man's pudding" is the plainest branch of a large family of nineteenth-century baked rice puddings: milk, rice, and whatever sweetener was cheapest. In American kitchens through much of the 1800s that often meant molasses, a byproduct of sugar production and long a common everyday sweetener in the Northeast, where refined white sugar was comparatively dear. The dish needs no eggs and almost no attention. Cookbooks of this period commonly printed such variations as a short note keyed to a fuller recipe nearby -- here, the plain Rice Pudding.