Rice in Milk
1½ cups hot milk 1/2 cup rice 1/2 teaspoon salt Clean the rice as for boiling in water; and cook with the milk and salt, adding a few seeded or sultana raisins if desired. Serve hot like boiled rice or press into small cups, cool and serve with cream and sugar.
A plain milk-cooked rice, written for a cook who already knows how long rice takes. Two things need attention: the pan and the stray line at the end.
- The orphaned farinaThe trailing "3 tablespoons farina" belongs to no step in this recipe and looks like a stray line carried over from a neighbouring entry. Ignore it; adding farina here will give you paste.
- Use a double boilerRice in milk scorches on a direct flame long before the grain is tender, and scorched milk taints the whole pot. Set the rice, milk and salt over simmering water, cover, and let it go 45 minutes to an hour without stirring much.
- The liquid is tightThree parts milk to one part rice is lean for a milk cook, since milk thickens rather than simply evaporating. Keep another half cup of hot milk at hand and add it if the grains are still chalky.
- Which riceA medium or short grain — the sort sold as pudding rice or Arborio — swells and releases starch, which is what makes this hold together in a cup. Long-grain converted rice will stay separate and will not mould.
- "Clean the rice as for boiling in water"This meant picking over for grit and hulls and rinsing well. Modern packaged rice needs only a rinse, and if you want the moulded version you can skip even that, since the surface starch helps it set.
- Moulding and unmouldingPress the hot rice firmly into rinsed cups or ramekins, cool completely, then run a knife round the edge and turn out. Chilling for an hour or two makes the turn-out far more reliable than cooling at room temperature.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups cooked rice — two generous servings hot, or three or four small moulded cups.
Rice simmered in milk is often said to be among the older sweet-adjacent dishes in the English kitchen, and it survived into early twentieth-century cookery books as nursery and invalid food: bland, cheap, filling and easy on a weak stomach. Mrs. Fryer's version is deliberately unsweetened, finished at table with cream, or not at all if the rice is being served hot as a starch alongside meat. That double life explains why the dish reads as a vegetable in one line and a dessert in the next, and the sultanas are offered as an option rather than an ingredient.