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Marshmallow Rice Pudding
Take 1½ pints of cold boiled rice and add to it milk, sugar and 1 egg just as you would for an ordinary baked rice pudding. Then place on the top 1 dozen marshmallows which have been soaked for two or three hours in milk, and bake until a light brown tint. Serve with cream.
This makes a very dainty and nourishing pudding, the marshmallows giving it a delicate flavor.
A leftover-rice pudding with a broiled marshmallow lid. The original assumes you already know the proportions for a baked rice pudding, so the custard is left to your judgment.
- 1½ pints of cold boiled riceThat is 3 cups of cooked rice, roughly what you get from 1 cup raw. It is a leftovers recipe; freshly cooked rice will work but should be cooled first so it does not thin the custard.
- The unmeasured custard"Milk, sugar and 1 egg just as you would for an ordinary baked rice pudding" is genuinely ambiguous. A pudding of this size would take something in the region of 2 cups milk and 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar to one egg, with a little salt, but the recipe gives no figure and the result will be looser or firmer depending on what you choose.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is stated. A custard-set rice pudding wants 350F, about 40 to 50 minutes, until the centre is just set and no longer soupy.
- Marshmallows have changed1900s marshmallows were dense, gelatin-and-gum confections that could sit in milk for hours and hold their shape. Modern extruded marshmallows are mostly air and will slump or dissolve in a long soak; 15 to 20 minutes is closer to the intent, or brush them with milk instead.
- Add them at the endThis is the hinge. Marshmallows on top for the full bake will scorch and weep sugar. Bake the pudding until set, then add the marshmallows and return it for 3 to 5 minutes, or run it under the broiler for a minute, watching it continuously.
- A dozen marshmallows12 to 16 standard modern marshmallows will cover the top of a 1½-quart dish in a single layer. Do not overlap them.
- YieldServes 4 to 6. Serve warm rather than hot, with cream poured at the table as directed; the topping goes tough once fully cold.
Marshmallow originally meant the plant Althaea officinalis, whose mucilaginous root was boiled with sugar into a soothing lozenge sold by apothecaries. By the time this book was printed the root had been dropped in favour of gelatin or egg white whipped with sugar syrup, and marshmallows were a shelf-stable American grocery item, often sold loose by the pound. The recipe belongs to a familiar economy of the period, in which cold cooked rice, stale bread and yesterday's potatoes were reworked into desserts rather than thrown out, and the toasted-marshmallow topping is the same trick that later settled permanently onto sweet potato casserole.