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Rice Pudding
I CUP COOKED RICE 4 CUPS MILK I CUP DRIED FRUITS (CURRANTS, RAISINS, DATES, OR WHAT- HAVE-YOU) 1/2 TEASPOON NUTMEG, OR CINNAMON, OR MIXED 3 EGGS 3/4 CUP SUGAR SALT Put rice in saucepan with milk and set over gentle heat 20 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Add fruits and spice. Beat eggs with sugar until very light and add. Add salt to taste. Stir and simmer 1 minute, or until eggs have a chance to thicken but not to curdle. May be eaten hot but is better cold.
To finish the same pudding in the oven, use 4 eggs and save out 2 of the egg whites for the meringue. When pudding is ready (as above) pour into buttered baking dish, and let brown in oven for 20 minutes or so. Meanwhile beat egg whites and when they begin to stiffen, gradually add 2 tablespoons sugar. By this time the pudding is attractively colored. Take it out of oven, pile meringue on top so it stands up in little peaks, and set back in oven to brown. A meringue requires a slow oven, so if your oven was too hot, leave it open for a moment before putting pudding back into it. If the heat is right it will take 25-30 minutes for meringue to brown and become firm.
A stovetop rice custard with an optional oven-and-meringue finish. The whole thing hinges on the egg step: the pudding must thicken without ever reaching a simmer that would scramble it.
- The egg step"Simmer 1 minute" is optimistic phrasing for tempering a custard. Pull the pan off direct heat, whisk a ladleful of hot rice and milk into the beaten eggs and sugar, return everything to low heat and stir until it coats a spoon, around 175-180F. Above about 185F the eggs curdle and no amount of stirring brings them back.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe names none for the first browning of the poured-out pudding; a moderate oven is the usual reading. The meringue stage is the "slow oven" the text does name, conventionally read today as somewhere around 300-325F. The instruction to leave the oven door open for a moment is a sound way to shed heat quickly if it has been running hotter.
- Cooked riceOne cup of cooked rice, not raw, which is roughly a third of a cup dry. Short or medium grain gives a creamier result; long grain stays separate and makes a thinner pudding.
- Milk ratioFour cups of milk to one cup of cooked rice is deliberately loose. Whole milk is the likely assumption; skim will still set but gives a noticeably thinner, less rich result.
- Dried fruitAdd the fruit with at least a few minutes of milk time left so it plumps. If using dates, consider dropping the sugar to a half cup.
- Meringue proportionsTwo whites to two tablespoons sugar is a soft, old-fashioned meringue, not a stiff Swiss or Italian one. It will weep a little on standing, which is normal; serve the meringue version the day it is made.
- Yield and servingRoughly six servings; allow a baking dish of two quarts or so. The note that it is "better cold" applies to the stovetop version, which firms up considerably in the refrigerator.
Rice pudding in this form — cooked rice finished in a milk-and-egg custard rather than baked slowly from raw grain — is a quicker variant that suits leftover rice. Baked rice puddings from raw rice, milk and long hours in a cooling oven are the older pattern; the version here is essentially a boiled custard using rice as the body, which is why the egg instruction is so anxious. The meringue top belongs to the same family of thrift as lemon meringue and "queen of puddings": the yolks go into the custard, the whites would otherwise be wasted, and two tablespoons of sugar turns them into a course of their own.