Rice Pudding
Boil half a pound of rice in milk, till quite tender. Then mash the grains well with a wooden spoon. Add three-quarters of a pound of sugar, and the same of melted butter, half a nutmeg, six eggs, a gill of wine, and some grated lemon peel. Bake it in a paste. For a change, it may be boiled, and eaten with butter, sugar, and wine.--Mrs. E.
Rice Pudding.
Sweeten three pints of sweet milk, and flavor with lemon or vanilla. Put in this a small cupful of raw rice, thoroughly washed. Bake, and serve cold.--Mrs. H. S.
Rice Pudding. 3 cupfuls boiled rice. 6 eggs. 1 1/2 cupful sugar. 1 1/2 pint milk. 1 wine-glassful wine and brandy. 1 tablespoonful melted butter. Flavor with nutmeg.--Mrs. Col. S.
Rice Pudding.
Boil a cup of rice till nearly done, then add a pint of milk. When perfectly done, mash, and while hot, add half a pound of butter, one pound of sugar, six fresh eggs, beaten till light. (Beat the sugar with the eggs.) Season with wine or brandy, and one grated nutmeg. Lemon is another good seasoning for it. Put in rich puff paste, and bake till a light brown.--Mrs. Dr. R. W. W. Rice Pudding.
Boil one cup of rice in one quart of milk. Add six eggs and a small tablespoonful of butter. Sweeten and flavor to the taste, and bake.--Mrs. B.
Five contributors' versions of one dish, ranging from a rich baked custard in a pastry shell to a plain slow-baked rice and milk. The older units and the pastry instruction are the main things needing translation.
- A gill and a wine-glassfulA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A wine-glassful in American receipts of this period is about 2 fl oz, so Mrs. Col. S.'s "1 wine-glassful wine and brandy" means roughly 2 oz total, not 2 oz of each.
- "Bake it in a paste"This means line a deep dish with pastry and pour the filling in — a custard tart, not a crumb topping. Mrs. Dr. R. W. W.'s "rich puff paste" is a butter pastry; blind-bake the shell before filling or the wet rice custard will leave it slack.
- Oven temperatureThese are egg custards. Bake at 325-350F until the center is just set with a slight wobble, 45-60 minutes for a filled shell. "Till a light brown" probably refers to the pastry and the surface of the pudding taking colour rather than to cooking the custard until it browns through.
- Mrs. H. S.'s version is the outlierRaw rice in three pints of sweetened milk with no eggs is the slow-oven, self-thickening pudding: 300-325F for 2 to 2.5 hours, stirring the skin down once or twice in the first hour. A small cupful of rice to three pints of milk is a correct ratio; it will look alarmingly thin for the first hour.
- Sugar and butter are period-heavyThree-quarters of a pound each of sugar and butter to half a pound of rice, or a pound of sugar and half a pound of butter in Mrs. Dr. R. W. W.'s, gives a very rich, confectionery-sweet pudding by current taste. Halving both in those two versions still sets and still tastes of the period.
- NutmegA whole nutmeg grates to roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons, so half a nutmeg is somewhere around 1 to 1.5 teaspoons. Grate it fresh and start with a third of the stated amount if you are not used to it.
- YieldThe richest six-egg versions (Mrs. E.'s, Mrs. Col. S.'s and Mrs. Dr. R. W. W.'s) will fill a 9- or 10-inch deep dish and serve eight or so. Mrs. B.'s also uses six eggs but is much plainer; Mrs. H. S.'s eggless pudding is the plainest of the five.
- ServingMrs. H. S. specifies cold, and the eggless slow-baked pudding is better that way. The custard versions in pastry are best barely warm; the boiled variant in the first receipt is simply to be eaten with butter, sugar and wine.
Rice pudding in a pastry shell is the older English form, often said to be closer to a Tudor and Stuart "rice tart" than to the nursery pudding of the twentieth century. Its presence here in five separate versions, each credited only to an initial, shows how Housekeeping in Old Virginia (compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, 1878) was assembled: contributions solicited from many Virginia housekeepers and printed side by side rather than reconciled into one authoritative receipt, so the reader could see the range of practice within a single circle. The rice itself came up the coastal trade from the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry plantations, which supplied most American rice before the industry moved west to Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas; wine and brandy in a sweet pudding, and the free hand with nutmeg and lemon peel, are both marks of a household still cooking in an eighteenth-century idiom.