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Rice Pudding
½ lb. (1 heaping cup) rice 2 quarts (8 cups) milk 1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar 1 teaspoonful salt 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1 teaspoonful rose extract Wash the rice and soak it in one quart of the milk for one hour. Add the rest of the milk, the sugar, salt, butter, nutmeg, and rose extract. Turn into a buttered earthenware dish and bake slowly for two hours.
A plain baked rice pudding of the old school: raw rice, milk and a long slow oven, with no eggs to set it. A few numbers in the ingredient list need reading with care.
- The rice quantity is a misprint1½ lb. of rice and 1 heaping cup are not the same thing. A heaping cup of raw rice weighs about 7-8 oz, so the intended amount is almost certainly ½ lb. Use the cup measure and ignore the pound figure, or the milk will be absorbed long before the pudding cooks.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no temperature; a slow oven in books of this period is usually reckoned somewhere between about 275F and 325F. At that sort of heat the two hours quoted is realistic; the pudding is done when the rice is tender and the surface has browned and wrinkled.
- Which riceUse a short or medium grain white rice, which releases starch and thickens the milk. Long grain stays separate and parboiled or converted rice will not soften properly in the time given.
- Rose extractThe strength of the rose extract meant here is uncertain, though a whole teaspoonful in two quarts of milk suggests something milder than a modern concentrate, nearer rose water. Modern concentrated rose flavouring is far stronger; start with a quarter teaspoon and taste the milk before it goes in the oven.
- The earthenware dishA wide shallow dish gives more skin and browns better; a deep one keeps the pudding creamier. Butter it well and set it on a baking sheet, since milk puddings boil over readily in the first half hour.
- StirringStir the pudding once or twice in the first hour to keep the rice from settling in a solid layer at the bottom, then leave it alone so the skin forms.
- MilkWhole milk is what is meant. Skimmed milk gives a thin, slightly grainy result; a splash of cream in the last half hour is closer to the intended richness.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk makes a large pudding, enough for eight to ten. Halve everything for a household of four. It is good warm and equally good cold, though with no eggs to set it, it will not cut cleanly.
Baked rice pudding of this kind belongs to a long English tradition in which rice, sugar and milk were left in a cooling bread oven for hours until the grains swelled and the top caught. Rice was an imported luxury in the seventeenth century and a cheap staple by the late nineteenth, which is how a dish once flavoured with expensive spices ended up in every economical cookery book. The rose extract here is the older layer showing through: rose water was a common sweet flavouring in English kitchens before vanilla became widespread, and it lingered in rice and almond puddings into the twentieth century, here paired with nutmeg.