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Invalid Pudding
1/2 pint (I cup) milk I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter 1 tablespoonful sugar I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) rice flour 2 egg whites 2 tablespoonfuls cream Little grated nutmeg Put the milk, butter, sugar, and grated nutmeg into a saucepan and bring to boiling point. Mix the rice flour with the cream and stir into the boiling milk.
Allow to cool for a minute, then add the whites of eggs stiffly beaten.
Pour into a buttered fireproof dish and bake quickly.
I flounder
A small baked milk pudding thickened with rice flour and lightened with beaten egg white — essentially a soufflé-textured blancmange. It is built on one hinge: the whites go in after the thickened milk has cooled slightly, and it goes straight into a hot oven.
- QuantitiesThe recipe glosses its half-pint as one cup; whether that is the 10 fl oz Imperial half-pint or an 8 fl oz cup is not clear from the page, and anywhere in that range works. The "heaping tablespoonful (1 oz.)" of butter is about 2 tablespoons, and 1 oz of rice flour is roughly 3 tablespoons.
- Bake quicklyThe recipe gives no temperature or time; "quickly" conventionally implies a hot oven, somewhere around 425-450F, at which a single dish of this size would be expected to set and puff in roughly 15-20 minutes, golden on top and just firm at the centre.
- Rice flourSold as rice flour, and often used interchangeably with ground rice, though ground rice is usually a coarser milling. Neither is the same as glutinous (sweet) rice flour, which will give a gummy set. Cornflour can stand in but produces a slicker, more translucent pudding.
- Fireproof dishA glazed earthenware or heatproof baking dish, buttered and filled no more than two-thirds, since the whites will lift the mixture.
- Cooling before the whitesA minute off the heat is the minimum. If the thickened milk is still near boiling the whites will cook on contact and the pudding will be dense rather than light.
- YieldOne generous invalid's portion, or two small dessert servings. It falls as it cools, so serve it directly from the oven.
Nearly every general cookery book of the late Victorian and Edwardian decades carried a section of "invalid recipes" — bland, soft, quickly digested dishes for the sickroom, when long convalescence at home was ordinary and the cook, not a hospital kitchen, fed the patient. Rice flour and milk were staples of that repertoire: starchy, mild, and thought easy on a weakened stomach, the same logic behind arrowroot, beef tea and gruel. The whipped whites here are the one concession to appetite rather than digestion, turning a plain thickened milk into something light enough to tempt someone who is not hungry. Nutmeg was the standard grating for milk puddings of every class, invalid or not.