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Cream of Rice Pudding
4½ heaping tablespoonfuls 1½ pints (3 cups) hot milk (4½ ozs.) rice flour I heaping tablespoonful (1½ oz.) powdered gelatine 1/2 pint (I cup) whipping cream ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract 4 heaping tablespoonfuls (4 ozs.) sugar Grated rind 2 lemons 1/2 gills (3/4 cup) cold milk Some stewed fruit Mix the hot milk, sugar, and lemon rind together, then bring slowly to the boiling point; stir in the gelatine and mix until dissolved. Stir in the rice flour mixed with the cold milk. Stir over the fire till it simmers for ten minutes.
Cool slightly and add the cream and the vanilla extract. Pour into a wet earthenware jelly mould.
Turn out when set and serve with stewed fruit.
A moulded rice-flour cream, set with gelatine and turned out cold — closer to a blancmange than to a baked rice pudding. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements need untangling before you start.
- The quantities, restatedWorking from the ounce weights the book supplies: about 4½ oz (roughly 125 g) rice flour, 4 oz (115 g) sugar, ½ oz (15 g) powdered gelatine, 3 cups hot milk, ¾ cup cold milk, 1 cup whipping cream, 1½ teaspoons vanilla, and the grated rind of two lemons. The tablespoon counts in the original are rough equivalents of those weights and should be treated as secondary.
- GillsA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a cup in US measure; the ¾ cup given alongside corresponds to 1½ gills of cold milk. That cold milk is there only to slake the rice flour.
- Rice flour, not riceThis is finely milled rice, sold as rice flour in baking aisles and as such in most Asian groceries. Do not substitute glutinous (sweet) rice flour, which sets sticky, and do not use ground rice, which is coarser and will stay gritty.
- Slake the flour firstThe hinge of the recipe. Whisk the rice flour into the cold milk to a smooth cream before it meets the hot milk, or you will get lumps that no amount of stirring will break up once the starch has set.
- GelatineHalf an ounce of powdered gelatine is roughly two envelopes of modern gelatine. Soften it in a little liquid before it goes in rather than tipping it dry into the pan.
- Ten minutes of simmeringThat length is not padding — rice flour needs sustained heat to gelatinise fully and lose its raw taste. Keep the heat low and stir constantly with a flat-ended spoon, because the starch will catch on the bottom of the pan.
- Cool before the creamThe recipe says only 'cool slightly'; let the mixture drop well below boiling before the cream goes in, since cream stirred into a near-boiling starch base can thin or split it. The cream goes in unwhipped.
- Wetting the mouldRinsing the mould with cold water and leaving it wet is what lets the pudding release. A 1½-quart mould is about right. Chill at least four hours, preferably overnight; dip the mould briefly in hot water to turn it out.
- YieldServes six to eight. Any stewed fruit with some acidity — plums, rhubarb, apricots, gooseberries — balances the richness better than a very sweet compote.
Rice flour puddings set in a mould belong to a long line of European white "creams" — blancmange, flummery, crème de riz — in which a starch or an animal gelatine, rather than eggs, does the setting. The Victorian and Edwardian household leaned on them heavily: they could be made in the morning, left in a cool larder, and turned out at dinner with whatever fruit the season offered, all without the anxiety of a custard curdling. Commercial sheet and powdered gelatine, cheap and reliable by the late nineteenth century, is what put dishes like this within reach of ordinary cooks rather than confectioners, and the flavourings here — lemon rind steeped in the hot milk, vanilla extract added off the heat — are the standard pairing of the period.