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Orange Pudding
4 oranges 2 tablespoons sifted sugar 1 tablespoon ground rice 1 pint of milk Peel, and cut the oranges into thin slices, and remove all the pits and white skin, and sift over the sugar. Warm the milk. Make a smooth paste of the ground rice with a little water, and add to the milk; stir until thick, and then pour over the fruit. Serve either hot or cold.
A simple milk-and-rice-flour sauce poured over sliced oranges. It works, but two details in the original will trip up a modern cook: what "ground rice" is, and how thin a single tablespoon of it leaves the sauce.
- Ground riceMilled raw rice, not rice grains. In period usage it was often a slightly coarser grind than modern rice flour, but rice flour is the usual substitute and is sold in most supermarkets and in Asian groceries. Slake it with a few tablespoons of cold water before it goes near the hot milk, as directed, or it will lump.
- Sifted sugarPeriod shorthand for sugar broken down and passed through a sieve to a fine grade; caster or superfine sugar is the closest modern equivalent and dissolves fastest on cut fruit.
- The pintIf the book is British, a pint is 20 fl oz (about 2 1/2 cups); an American pint is 16 fl oz (2 cups). Either works, but the smaller measure gives a noticeably thicker sauce.
- ThicknessOne tablespoon of rice flour to a pint of milk yields a pouring sauce, not a set pudding. If you want something spoonable that holds its shape, expect to use two to three tablespoons and to cook it a full two or three minutes after it thickens so the starch loses its raw taste.
- CurdlingOrange juice and hot milk can be an unstable pair. Slice the oranges over a plate, drain off the loose juice, and let the thickened milk cool for a minute before pouring; a very hot sauce hitting acidic fruit may separate at the edges.
- Pith"White skin" presumably covers the pith, and probably the membrane between segments as well. Peeling deep enough to expose the flesh and then cutting into rounds removes most of it in one stroke; the bitterness of the pith is the likely reason for the instruction.
- YieldServes four in small glasses or bowls. Assemble it no more than an hour or two ahead, as the fruit continues to release juice and thins the sauce.
This is a nursery-and-invalid sort of dish in a plain Anglo-American tradition: fruit under a thin milk sauce thickened with a starch rather than eggs. Ground rice was a common item in Victorian and Edwardian pantries, cheaper than arrowroot and reputed to be gentler on the stomach than wheat flour, which is part of why it turns up in puddings meant for children and the convalescent.