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Plain Rice Pudding
Put into a quart pan ½ cupful of rice, add a lump of butter the size of a hulled walnut, sugar to sweeten, a grating of nutmeg, and ½ teacupful of raisins, then fill up the pan with milk, stir occasionally while baking and add more milk if it is likely to become too dry.
A New Way of Making Rice Pudding Take 1/2 cupful of rice ; soak in a little milk one-half an hour; add 2 quarts of milk, a little salt and 1 cupful of raisins; then add 1 cupful of sugar; season with vanilla; bake in medium heated oven until well done.
Two versions of the same baked starch pudding, neither with eggs, both relying on long slow cooking to swell the rice and reduce the milk. The proportions in the first are the thing to watch.
- The rice-to-pan problemA quart pan holding 1½ cups of raw rice plus enough milk to fill it will boil over and still come out stiff. Raw rice swells to several times its volume over a long bake, so figure no more than about ½ cup rice per quart of milk; the second version is leaner still, at ½ cup rice to 2 quarts. Treat the second set of proportions as the reliable one.
- Teacupful and lump of butterA teacupful in period American cookbooks is usually reckoned at somewhere between ½ and ¾ cup, so ½ teacupful of raisins is roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons. Butter "the size of a hulled walnut" is about 1 tablespoon.
- Medium ovenA medium or moderate oven is 325-350F. At that heat a quart of milk and ½ cup rice needs 2 to 2½ hours; the second version's 2 quarts will want closer to 3 hours.
- Stirring is the hingeStir the first version every 20 to 30 minutes for the first two hours. This keeps the rice from settling into a solid raft on the bottom and distributes the starch, which is what thickens the pudding in the absence of eggs. Stop stirring in the last half hour if you want the brown skin on top.
- Milk mattersWhole milk only, and a splash of cream at the end if it looks thin. Skim or low-fat milk will give you a watery, chalky pudding, since fat is doing the work that eggs would do in a custard-style rice pudding.
- Sugar to sweetenFor a quart of milk, 1/3 to ½ cup sugar suits most palates; the second version's 1 cup to 2 quarts is in the same range.
- RaisinsAdded at the start they swell and soften but can sink and scorch against the dish. Stirring solves this, or add them in the last 45 minutes if you prefer them plumper and more distinct.
- YieldThe first version fills a 1-quart dish and serves 4. The second, with 2 quarts of milk, needs a 3-quart baking dish with headroom and serves 8.
Baked rice pudding of this kind, sweetened milk and rice left to swell for hours in a slack oven, was standard economy cookery on both sides of the Atlantic through the nineteenth century, and belongs to the older tradition of pottages and milk puddings rather than to the egg custards it is often confused with. It earns its place in a low-cost collection for the plainest of reasons: rice, milk and sugar were among the cheapest calories a household could buy, and the dish demanded no eggs, no pastry and no attention beyond an occasional stir while the oven was already hot from the day's baking. The nutmeg is the one flourish, and a telling one; grated nutmeg was a common seasoning for milk dishes in English and American kitchens long before vanilla extract became cheap and widely available.