Rice Milk
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 children.-3 tablespoonfuls of rice, 1 quart of milk, sugar to taste; when liked, a little grated nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 5d, RICE PUDDING.
Well wash the rice, put it into a saucepan with the milk, and simmer gently until the rice is tender, stirring it from time to prevent the milk from burning; sweeten it, add a little grated nutmeg, and serve. This dish is also very suitable and wholesome for children; it may be flavoured with a little lemon-peel, and a little finelyminced suet may be boiled with it, which renders it more strengthening and more wholesome. Tapioca, semolina, vermicelli and macaroni may all be dressed in the same manner.
TIME. From to 1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain milk pudding cooked entirely on the hob rather than in the oven, sweetened at the end. It needs little more than patience and a heavy pan.
- The hinge: low heat and stirringMilk sugars catch and scorch on the base long before the rice is soft, and the burnt taste carries through the whole pot. Use the heaviest pan you own, keep the heat at a bare tremble, and stir down to the corners every few minutes.
- QuantitiesThree tablespoons of rice to a quart (an imperial quart, about 1.1 litres) of milk is a very loose ratio, giving a pourable milk pudding rather than a spoonable one. Use short-grain pudding rice; long-grain will soften without thickening the milk in the same way.
- TimingReckon on 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering for short-grain rice to swell and burst. The stated cooking time in the original has lost its lower figure, so judge by the rice, not the clock.
- Sweeten at the endSugar added at the start increases the risk of catching on the base. Stir it in once the grains are tender, then taste.
- SuetThe finely minced suet is optional; the original recommends it as making the dish 'more strengthening and more wholesome', i.e. for nourishment rather than flavour. Modern shredded suet works if you want the effect, or stir in a knob of butter at the end.
- Lemon peel and nutmegUse a pared strip of unwaxed lemon rind and fish it out before serving rather than grated zest, which turns bitter over a long simmer. Grate the nutmeg fresh at the table.
- Cost and yieldThe 5d. figure is Victorian retail pricing and has no modern equivalent. As written it serves four children or two adults as a light pudding.
- The other grainsSemolina and the pastas cook far faster than rice in milk -- semolina in about ten minutes, vermicelli or macaroni in fifteen -- so do not carry the rice timing across to them. Tapioca is the exception: pearl tapioca needs soaking and a long slow simmer of its own.
Milk puddings of grain simmered in milk were the backbone of Victorian nursery and invalid cookery: cheap, bland, easy to digest, and thought to be strengthening, which is exactly the language used here about the suet. Rice is often said to have become inexpensive enough by the middle of the nineteenth century for daily use in ordinary households, though how far that held is hard to demonstrate. The note that tapioca, semolina, vermicelli and macaroni may all be dressed the same way reflects how these dishes were understood at the time — not as separate recipes but as one method applied to whichever starch was in the cupboard.