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Rice Pudding
½ cup rice 4 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon nutmeg ½ cup seeded raisins 4 cups hot milk 2 cups cold milk Mix first six ingredients; pour into buttered pudding dish; cook in a slow oven two hours, stirring occasionally the first hour. At the end of two hours add the cold milk and cook half an hour longer.
Serve with sugar and cream.
A baked rice pudding of the long, slow, unstirred-custard school: no eggs, just rice swelling in milk until the starch thickens it. Two and a half hours is not padding, and the additions of cold milk partway through is the point of the method.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures; "slow oven" was generally understood as somewhere in the 250-325F (120-160C) range, so about 300F (150C) is a reasonable modern setting, lower if your oven runs hot. At the upper end of that range the milk is more likely to scorch at the edges before the rice softens.
- The hinge: cold milk lateThe second 2 cups of milk go in only after two hours, once the rice has absorbed the first four cups. This loosens a pudding that has already set and lets the last half hour build a fresh skin on top.
- Stirring, and when to stopStir every 20-30 minutes for the first hour to keep the rice from settling into a raft on the bottom. After that leave it alone so the surface browns.
- The salt is highA full teaspoon of salt in a sweet pudding reads as a lot to modern palates; half a teaspoon may suit better.
- Rice to useShort or medium grain white rice, uncooked and unrinsed, gives the creamiest result; the surface starch is what thickens the milk. Long grain works but stays firmer, and parboiled or instant rice is unlikely to give the same thickening.
- MilkWhole milk. Skim or low fat will not carry two and a half hours of oven time without turning thin and slightly grainy.
- NutmegHalf a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg is assertive; the pre-ground tin is milder and staler, so adjust to taste rather than measure blindly.
- Dish and yieldUse a 2-quart baking dish, buttered, and set it on a rimmed sheet in case of boil-over. Serves 6.
Baked rice pudding belongs to a family of slow-oven milk puddings that were standard in British and American households through the nineteenth century, often said to have been cooked at the tail end of a wood or coal fire's heat, when the oven was cooling and needed no further tending. The eggless version here relies entirely on rice starch rather than custard for its body, which made it cheap. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book is a reminder that books published by chocolate companies were full-service household manuals, not just collections of confectionery: Maria Willett Howard's 1907 volume for the Walter M. Lowney Company covered soups, meats and plain puddings alongside the cocoa recipes that justified the sponsorship. Raisins and nutmeg were the conventional flavourings, both of them pantry staples that kept well in a period when fresh fruit for dessert was seasonal.