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Cream Rice Pudding
3 tablespoons rice 1 tablespoon sugar 1 quart milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon or nutmeg Wash the rice thoroughly, add the other ingredients and pour into a greased baking-dish. Bake for three hours in a slow oven, stirring several times during the first hour. The mixture should not boil. Serve either hot or cold. This is the old-fashioned creamy pudding which has such a delicious flavor because of the long slow cooking. One-half cup or raisins may be added, if desired.
A baked rice pudding with no eggs and no cream — the richness comes entirely from milk reducing slowly over three hours. Almost everything depends on keeping the oven low enough that the milk never simmers.
- Oven temperatureA slow oven of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 275-325F; 300F, or lower if your oven runs hot, suits this pudding. Too high and the milk will simmer, curdle at the edges and set grainy rather than creamy.
- The stirringStirring during the first hour keeps the rice from settling into a solid raft on the bottom and folds the forming skin back in. Four or five stirs in that first hour is enough; leave it alone afterward so the top browns.
- Rice choiceUse a short or medium grain white rice — Arborio, Calrose or ordinary pudding rice. Long grain works but gives a looser pudding, and parboiled or converted rice will not release the starch that makes this creamy.
- Dish sizeA quart of milk plus rice needs a two-quart baking dish. The mixture looks alarmingly thin going in; it thickens only in the last hour as the rice swells and the milk reduces.
- SugarOne tablespoon to a quart of milk is barely sweet by current taste. Cooks wanting a conventionally sweet pudding would likely use 3 to 4 tablespoons.
- MilkWhole milk gives much the better result. Skim or 2% carries less fat to body up over three hours and tends to a thinner pudding with the rice settling at the bottom.
- RaisinsAdd them in the last hour rather than at the start, or they swell, split and bleed color through the whole dish.
- YieldServes four to six. Cold, it sets considerably firmer than it appears hot from the oven.