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Iced Rice Pudding
Cook one-half cup of rice in a quart of boiling salted water; when soft, drain, and pour over it one quart of milk; add to this one cup of sugar beaten with the yolks of two eggs. Beat the whites separately and add the yolks before stirring into the milk. Do not cook the eggs. Cool and flavor with one-half teaspoon of Larkin Orange Flavoring Extract and one-half teaspoon of Larkin Nutmeg. When chilled freeze the same as any ice-cream.
This is a frozen custard, not a baked pudding, and the original is explicit that the eggs are never to be cooked. That single instruction is what puts it out of reach today.
- The eggs are never heated at any stageThe rice is boiled in water and drained, the milk is added cold to warm rice at most, and the sugar-and-egg mixture goes in afterward with the direction do not cook the eggs. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it — it simply holds it. Use a current recipe in which the custard base is cooked to temperature before churning.
- Freezing extends the exposure rather than ending itFreezing does not kill bacteria in a raw-egg base; it holds them. A frozen dessert is typically kept and eaten over a period of days, so any contamination present in the raw yolks and whites persists for as long as the batch lasts.
- A quart of milk, unqualifiedWhen this was written, household milk was often unpasteurised, and the milk here is only poured over the drained rice, never brought to a safe temperature. With modern pasteurised milk this matters less than the raw eggs, but with raw milk it would compound the problem.
- "Freeze the same as any ice-cream"In a kitchen of this period this would have meant a hand-cranked freezer: an inner canister surrounded by cracked ice and coarse salt, turned until the paddle stiffens, then packed to harden. The phrase carries no time or temperature, so there is no guidance to salvage even if the base were safe.
- The Larkin flavouringsLarkin Orange Flavoring Extract and Larkin Nutmeg were the company's own branded products, sold by mail alongside its soap trade. They are long discontinued, and neither quantity translates reliably to a modern bottle.
Iced puddings occupy a strange middle ground in turn-of-the-century American dessert chapters: they take a nursery dish — rice cooked soft, sweetened, spiced with nutmeg — and put it through the ice-cream freezer, which was by then a fixture in many ordinary kitchens rather than only a confectioner's tool. Rice was a cheap thickener, and stretching a quart of milk with half a cup of it made a large, cold, filling dessert for very little money. The named Larkin extracts mark this as a promotional cookbook: the Larkin Company of Buffalo built its business selling soap by mail and gave away household goods and recipe books to keep customers ordering, so the flavourings in the ingredient list are as much the point of the page as the pudding is. Recipes calling for uncooked eggs in frozen desserts appear in such books and continued to for decades, which says less about the cooks than about how recently the bacteriology of eggs and milk entered the domestic kitchen.