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Rice Pudding
1 cup rice 1 1/2 quarts milk 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup sugar 1 cup seeded raisins Wash rice with several waters; put into pudding dish; add milk, salt and sugar and place in slow oven; bake about 1 1/2 hours or until thick, stirring several times during baking; add raisins, and bake 20 minutes longer. Raisins may be omitted and a teaspoon vanilla extract or a little grated orange peel may be added if desired.
A classic long-baked rice pudding: no eggs, no pre-cooked rice, just raw grains left to swell in milk until the starch thickens the whole dish. The proportions are sound, but the oven direction is the part that decides whether it works.
- Slow oven means 300FSlow oven -- roughly 275-325F (140-165C) -- A slow oven in books of this period is generally taken as somewhere in the 275-325F range; 300F (150C) is a safe middle, lower if your oven runs hot. Too high a heat tends to skin and scorch the milk at the edges before the rice has softened and released its starch.
- Use short or medium grain riceThe recipe specifies only "rice". Arborio or any short- or medium-grain white rice gives the creamy result the method aims at; long-grain basmati tends to stay separate and the pudding thinner.
- Do not use converted or instant riceParboiled and instant rices will not surrender enough starch to thicken 6 cups of milk, and the pudding stays soupy no matter how long it bakes.
- Quantities in modern terms1 1/2 quarts is 6 cups of milk to 1 cup of raw rice, a ratio of six to one. Whole milk is what the recipe expects; skim will not set to the same body.
- The stirring is not optionalStir every 20 to 30 minutes for the first hour to break up the skin and redistribute the rice, which otherwise settles into a dense layer at the bottom. Stop stirring for the last stretch if you want a browned top.
- Raisins go in late for a reasonRaisins go in late -- The recipe holds them back until the last 20 minutes, which is enough for them to plump; added at the start they would swell and soften for the full baking time.
- Judging donenessThe pudding should still look slightly loose when it comes out of the oven; it thickens considerably as it cools. Baked until stiff in the dish, it will be pasty at the table.
- YieldServes 6 to 8 as a dessert. Good warm, and also good cold, when it will need a splash of milk stirred through.
Baked rice pudding of this kind is the plainest version of a dish that runs back through medieval European rice pottages made with almond or cow's milk, when rice was an imported luxury sold by apothecaries. By the time this book appeared, American rice from the Carolinas and the Gulf coast had made it a cheap pantry staple, and the eggless, oven-baked form became a standard economy dessert: one cup of rice and some milk stretched to feed a family. The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the great free promotional cookbooks of the era, distributed to sell leavening; this recipe needs no baking powder at all. The alternatives offered at the end are vanilla extract or grated orange peel.