Home › Desserts › Rice and Raisins
Rice and Raisins
Wash well 1 cupful of rice. Drop into a kettle of boiling salted water and boil at a gallop until the grains feel tender when rubbed between thumb and fingers. Drain, add 1 cupful of seeded raisins which have been steamed until plump, then pack into a well-buttered mold.
Stand in the open oven for five minutes, turn out and serve with either hard sauce or butter and scraped maple sugar.
A frugal steamed-rice pudding with no eggs, milk or sugar in the body of it — the sweetness arrives entirely with the sauce. A few of the instructions assume habits that have since fallen away.
- Boil "at a gallop"This means a hard rolling boil in a large volume of salted water, pasta-style, rather than the absorption method. Use at least 2 quarts of water per cup of rice so the grains move freely; 12–15 minutes for long-grain white rice, tested by rubbing a grain between finger and thumb as directed.
- Which riceAny plain white rice works, but a medium-grain or short-grain variety gives the slight stickiness the mold needs to hold its shape. Long-grain and parboiled rice will turn out looser and may slump when unmolded.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" in 1900s usage means the seeds have been removed, not that seeds were added — muscatels were sold with pits in and had to be split and cleaned by hand. Modern seedless raisins need no such work; steam them 5 minutes over simmering water, or cover with boiling water and let stand 10 minutes, then drain well.
- The moldA 1-quart pudding basin, charlotte mold or plain metal bowl, generously buttered. Pack the rice in firmly while it is still hot — pressing it down with the back of a spoon is what makes it hold together on turning out.
- "Stand in the open oven"In a period kitchen this appears to mean the residual warmth of an oven left ajar, enough to set the surface without drying it; the recipe gives no temperature. A modern equivalent is a briefly warmed low oven, or simply covering the mold and letting it stand five minutes in a warm place.
- Hard sauceCommonly butter creamed with roughly one and a half to two times its weight in confectioners' sugar and flavored with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, then chilled firm so it melts over the hot pudding; proportions vary from book to book. "Scraped maple sugar" is a block of hard maple sugar shaved with a knife -- maple sugar is still sold in cakes, and granulated maple sugar substitutes directly.
- YieldAbout 4 servings. It is best turned out and eaten while hot; refrigerated rice firms up and goes chalky, though a leftover slice reheats reasonably under a cover.
Rice puddings of this kind belong to the long tradition of "cheap sweets" that filled the dessert chapters of economy cookbooks — dishes built from a starch, a dried fruit and whatever fat and sugar the household could spare. One might note that all the sugar sits in the sauce, where it is tasted directly, rather than being dissolved invisibly into the body of the pudding; a little goes further. Boiled rice packed into a buttered mold and turned out was a standard trick for making plain food look composed at table, and hard sauce — butter and sugar beaten cold, generally traced to English steamed-pudding cookery — was the all-purpose accompaniment to hot puddings on both sides of the Atlantic. The maple sugar alternative points to a North American kitchen, where a cake of maple sugar kept well in the pantry and could be scraped over a dish when nothing else sweet was in the house.