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Caramel Rice Pudding
2 eggs 1 cup sugar grated rind of one half orange Cook rice in milk, in double boiler, two hours; then add salt, eggs slightly beaten, and orange rind. Caramelize the sugar. When a golden brown liquid, pour into a hot pudding mold, coating the whole inner surface. Add rice mixture, cover and cook in oven in a pan of water twenty minutes. Remove from oven, let stand five minutes, turn on serving dish, and serve with soft custard. cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup milk
The ingredient list has come through the printing damaged: the rice and milk quantities are missing, and a stray line from the next recipe ("cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup milk") has been appended at the end. The method is intact and workable if you supply the proportions yourself.
- Missing quantitiesNothing in the text gives the rice or milk. For a mold of this size, a standard old-book proportion is about 1/2 cup rice to 1 quart milk with 1/4 teaspoon salt, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says. Ignore the trailing butter/sugar/milk line entirely.
- The sugar does double dutyThe 1 cup sugar is caramelized for the mold lining, not stirred into the rice. That means the pudding itself is sweetened only by the caramel that dissolves into it as it bakes.
- Caramel timingMelt the sugar dry over moderate heat and pull it off at pale amber. Sugar keeps cooking off the heat, and caramel that reaches dark brown in the pan will be bitter by the time it has coated the mold.
- Hot mold, hot caramelWarm the mold first as directed. Caramel poured into a cold metal mold seizes on contact and will not spread; tilting a hot mold gets an even film in a few seconds.
- Two hours in the double boilerThat is not an error. Rice cooked gently in milk over water breaks down into something closer to a thick creamy porridge than distinct grains, which is what holds the custard together. Stir occasionally and add milk if it tightens too much.
- Adding the eggsLet the rice cool below scalding before the beaten eggs go in, or they will scramble in streaks. The mixture should be warm to the finger, not steaming.
- The water bathThe book gives no oven temperature, only 'cook in oven in a pan of water'; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading, with hot water reaching halfway up the mold. The twenty minutes directed suits a shallow mold; a deeper one will need longer, and it is done when a knife near the center comes out clean and the middle no longer ripples.
- UnmoldingThe five-minute rest lets the caramel loosen. Much longer and it re-hardens and grips the mold; run the mold briefly in hot water if it sticks.
- YieldThe book gives neither a mold size nor a number of servings. The soft custard called for is a stirred pouring custard, not a baked one.
Caramel-lined molded puddings belong to the French tradition of *creme renversee* -- custard turned out of its mold so the caramel becomes a sauce -- and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks were applying the same trick to thriftier fillings such as rice, bread and cornstarch. Rice pudding was a common item in the era's economical dessert repertoire. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and promoted its cocoa and chocolate, but it carried general chapters alongside the chocolate recipes, and a plain molded rice pudding like this one sits among them.