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Rice and Apple Pudding
1 breakfast cup of rice 6 good looking apples 2 cloves 1/2 lemon, rind only 2 teaspoons sugar Boil the rice for a quarter of an hour in boiling water; strain through a hair sieve. Put a cloth into a pudding basin, lay the rice all around it like a crust; quarter some apples as for a tart, and lay them in the middle of the rice, add the sugar, lemon rind and cloves over the apples with rice, and tie the cloth fairly tight. Boil the pudding for one hour, or steam it for one and one-half hours, and serve with some sweet sauce poured over.
A cloth-lined basin pudding of the old English school, where parboiled rice does the work that suet pastry does in a roly-poly. The whole thing hinges on the rice being just short of cooked when you line the basin.
- The breakfast cupA breakfast cup is roughly 10 fl oz, so a generous 1 1/4 cups of raw rice. That yields a good deal of cooked rice; use a 1 1/2 to 2 quart basin.
- Which riceUse a short-grain pudding rice or arborio. The starch is what makes the parboiled grains cling together into a crust; long-grain rice stays separate and the casing collapses when you turn it out.
- The quarter hour of boilingFifteen minutes leaves the rice swollen but firm at the centre, which is intended. It finishes cooking in the steam of the second cooking, and rice boiled soft at this stage turns to paste.
- DrainingA hair sieve is simply a fine-mesh sieve. Drain well and let the rice cool enough to handle before pressing it up the sides of the cloth.
- Lining the clothScald the cloth, wring it out, and flour it before laying it in the basin — the standard treatment for a boiled pudding cloth, and it keeps the rice from welding itself to the fabric. Tie the top with string but leave a little slack, as the pudding swells.
- The applesA tart cooking apple such as Bramley or Granny Smith breaks down properly in an hour of steam; a sweet eating apple stays firm and watery. Six apples is a lot for one basin — peel, core and quarter, and stop when the basin is full.
- Sugar and clovesTwo teaspoons of sugar is very little sweetness by modern standards, and depends on the sauce carrying the dish. Two whole cloves are assertive against plain apple; find and remove them before serving, or the person who bites one will remember it.
- Cooking and servingAn hour at a steady boil with the water halfway up the basin, or 90 minutes in a steamer, topping up with boiling water as needed. Rest five minutes before turning out. Serves four to six, with custard or a lemon or vanilla sweet sauce.
Boiled puddings tied in a cloth were a mainstay of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward, cheap to fuel because they shared a pot with whatever else was on the fire, and endlessly adaptable — suet crust for savoury fillings, batter or breadcrumbs or, as here, rice for sweet ones. Rice was long used in British kitchens for milk puddings, and here takes on the structural job of standing in for pastry, which was useful when flour and fat were dear. Books with titles of this kind were common in the First World War period, when Allied governments pressed households to observe meatless days and conserve wheat, sugar and fat for the front.