Rice Pie
1 cup sweet milk, beaten yolks of two eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup boiled rice, piece butter size of walnut. Beat thoroughly; cook until eggs are done; remove from fire, flavor to taste. Pour mixture into baked crust.
Frosting-Whites of 2 eggs and little sugar. When cool drop small lumps of jelly around on top.
A stovetop rice custard poured into a pre-baked shell — closer to a pie-crust rice pudding than a set custard pie. The only real technique here is the custard, and the recipe assumes you know how far to take it.
- "Cook until eggs are done"This is the hinge. Stir the milk, yolks, sugar and rice over low heat or in a double boiler until it thickens and coats a spoon, around 170-175F. Let it reach a boil and the yolks will scramble into threads that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that older recipes often call for. Whole milk is the right substitution; nothing needs to be added to sweeten it.
- Butter size of a walnutAround a tablespoon, though period equivalency tables put the measure anywhere between one and two.
- The boiled riceHalf a cup of already-cooked rice, plain-boiled in water, not raw. A short or medium grain gives a softer body; long grain stays distinct in the custard.
- FlavoringLeft to the cook because the period pantry decided it: vanilla, lemon extract or grated nutmeg are all in keeping. Add it off the heat so it does not cook away.
- The crustA fully blind-baked shell, since nothing goes back into the oven. The recipe gives no pan size or yield; the filling is a small one, on the order of two cups, and would sit shallowly in a standard pie plate.
- The frostingAs written it is uncooked beaten whites with a little sugar, simply spread on the cooled pie. Modern practice is to either brown the meringue briefly in a hot oven or use pasteurized whites, since raw egg white carries a salmonella risk the original book did not account for.
- The jellyCurrant or apple jelly would suit — firm enough to sit in small dots on the white surface without weeping. Add it just before serving.
Rice in a pastry shell sits at the junction of two thrifty traditions: the boiled rice pudding, which stretched milk and eggs, and the custard pie, which gave leftovers a company face. A cup of milk and two yolks is a small custard, and the rice is doing the work of bulk here, exactly the sort of economy that community cookbooks traded in. Philathea books belong to that fundraising genre: the Philathea movement was the young women's wing of the adult Bible class movement that spread through Protestant Sunday schools from the 1890s, and its classes printed recipe collections gathered from members to raise money. That origin may explain the compression of the writing — no oven temperature, no pan size, no yield.