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Rice Pudding
1 egg, well beaten 1/2 cup sugar 2 cups milk 2 cups boiled rice 1/2 cup raisins dash nutmeg Beat egg, add sugar and milk and stir in rice. Sprinkle raisins in and grate nutmeg on top. Poach in medium oven until a knife thrust in comes out clean. Serves eight.
A baked rice custard of the plainest sort, built to be soft, sweet and easy to eat. The only real technique question is what "poach in a medium oven" means, and the answer is a water bath.
- Oven temperatureA medium or moderate oven is 350F. For a custard this loose, 325F is safer still and gives you a wider margin before the egg curdles.
- "Poach" means a bain-marie"Poach" probably points to a bain-marie -- set the filled dish in a larger pan and pour hot water halfway up its sides. The recipe does not say so outright, and rice puddings of this kind are often baked directly; but the water bath is the safer reading and protects the edges from setting hard before the centre does.
- TimingNo time is given. Expect 45 to 60 minutes in a 1 1/2-quart dish. The knife test is reliable, but pull it when the centre still wobbles slightly; carryover heat finishes the set.
- Boiled riceTwo cups of cooked rice, not raw. Any plain white rice works; short or medium grain gives a creamier result because it sheds more starch into the custard.
- One egg to two cups milkThat is a very lean custard by modern standards and it will be soft rather than sliceable. If you want it to hold a cut edge, more egg is needed, and two cups of milk will take several rather than one more.
- RaisinsThe recipe says to sprinkle them in, not over the top, so they should end up through the mixture rather than exposed. Soaking them briefly in hot water first helps them plump rather than draw moisture from the custard.
- YieldEight servings from this quantity works out to roughly two-thirds of a cup each, which is a small portion by modern dessert standards; four would be a more likely count today.
Baked rice pudding descends from the sweetened grain dishes of the medieval kitchen, and by the twentieth century it had become an archetypal nursery and sickroom dish in Britain and America alike. Milk, eggs, sugar and cooked starch in a soft form that requires almost no chewing were the standard tools of what cookbooks of the period called invalid cookery, aimed at putting weight on convalescents, the elderly and children thought to be failing. Diet sections of this kind were common in household manuals before hospital dietetics became a profession in its own right, and they tended to treat calorie density and digestibility as the two things that mattered. The nutmeg is the one flourish, and it is the traditional finish on milk puddings.