Rice, Plain Boiled
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 4 children. lb. of rice.
AVERAGE COST, 2d.
Wash the rice, tie it in a pudding-cloth, allowing room for the rice to swell, and put it into a saucepan of cold water; boil it gently for 2 hours, and if, after a time, the cloth seems tied too loosely, take the rice up and tighten the cloth. Serve with sweet melted butter, or cold butter and sugar, or stewed fruit, jam or marmalade, any of which accompaniments are suitable for plain boiled rice.
TIME.-2 hours after the water boils.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is not a pilaf but a Victorian cloth-boiled rice pudding, cooked in a tied cloth like a suet duff and served with a sweet accompaniment. The method works, but the timing belongs to a period of coarse, long-grain rice cooked to a solid mass.
- The rice quantityThe ingredient line has lost its fraction and reads only "lb. of rice". Comparable Victorian nursery puddings for four use about 1/2 lb (roughly 1 cup) of rice, which swells to a firm mould; treat that as a reasonable reading rather than a certainty.
- The pudding-clothUse a square of unbleached calico or a doubled cotton tea towel, scalded and wrung out, then floured on the inside. Tie it loosely enough that the rice can swell to three or four times its bulk, or the cloth will split.
- RetighteningAs the rice swells the cloth slackens, water can seep in and the outside turn to paste, so check the bundle partway through and take up the slack in the tie if it has loosened, as the recipe directs.
- Two hours is far too long todayTwo hours is longer than modern rice needs -- Modern milled long-grain rice is fully cooked in 12-15 minutes; in a cloth, well under an hour should give a rice firm enough to turn out. Two hours will produce a soft, gluey mass, which may be close to what was wanted from a nursery pudding.
- Start in cold waterUnusually for boiled puddings, the bundle goes into cold water. That lets the grains absorb slowly and evenly; keep the water at a bare simmer throughout and topped up so the bundle stays submerged.
- "Sweet melted butter"This appears to mean butter melted with sugar rather than the flour-thickened melted butter sauce of the same era. Cold butter with sugar, or warmed jam or marmalade thinned with a spoonful of water, all do the same job.
- Cost and yieldThe 2d. reflects rice as one of the cheapest bulk foods in a Victorian household. As written it is given as feeding four children.
Boiled rice reached the Victorian nursery through the cloth-pudding tradition rather than through any Eastern cookery: the technique here is identical to that for a plain suet or batter pudding, and the rice is treated as a starch to be moulded and sauced, not as a grain to be kept separate. Imported rice was cheap enough by the mid-nineteenth century to be a staple of institutional and children's cooking, and it was valued precisely for being bland and filling. Beeton's household books repeatedly offer it as the plainest possible sweet, with the interest supplied entirely by whatever butter, sugar or preserve the family could afford, which is why the recipe ends with a list of accompaniments rather than a flavouring. The insistence on room to swell and on retightening the cloth is a practical memory of a kitchen where a burst pudding meant losing the whole dinner.