Rice Pudding
4 cups milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup rice 1/3 cup sugar Grated rind half lemon Wash rice, mix ingredients, and pour into buttered pudding dish. Bake 3 hours in a very slow oven, stirring three times during first hour of baking to prevent rice from setting.
Raisins or currants added to above will give variety. 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar
A classic long-baked rice pudding, where the starch from the rice thickens the milk over three hours rather than being stirred into a custard. A few points of translation and one oddity in the printed text.
- "Very slow oven"Set the oven to 250-275F. Higher and the milk will boil and skin over instead of slowly reducing into the rice; the pudding will curdle or scorch at the edges before the grain is tender.
- The stray last lineThe "1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar" at the end belongs to no step in this recipe. It is almost certainly the first line of the next recipe in the book, picked up in transcription. Ignore it.
- Which riceUse a short or medium grain white rice — the kind sold as pudding rice, arborio or Calrose. Long grain will work but stays separate and gives a thinner pudding; parboiled or converted rice releases much less starch and will give a noticeably thinner, less creamy result.
- The stirring is the hingeThree stirs in the first hour, then leave it alone. The rice sinks and mats on the bottom while the milk is still thin; once it has begun to swell and suspend, further stirring only breaks up the skin that gives the pudding its traditional brown top.
- MilkWhole milk. The original assumed unhomogenised milk with cream in it; skim or 1% will reduce to something watery over three hours. A cup of the four replaced with cream gives a richer result closer to what the writer likely got.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest, no pith. Half a lemon is roughly a teaspoon of zest, which perfumes the milk without becoming bitter over a long bake.
- RaisinsIf adding raisins or currants, stir them in at the last of the three stirs rather than at the start. Three full hours in the oven turns them hard at the surface.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 1.5-quart baking dish; the milk needs headroom as it comes up to temperature. Serves four to six, warm or cold.
The long-baked milk-and-rice pudding is often said to be among the older surviving forms of British and American home cookery, descended from the sweetened, spiced rice dishes that came into European kitchens with rice itself and that are traditionally described as having been boiled in a cloth or a skin. What makes this version characteristic of turn-of-the-century American household books is its economy: a third of a cup of rice and four cups of milk, no eggs, no butter, and three hours of an oven that, in many households, was in any case kept warm much of the day by a coal or wood range. Nothing is wasted and almost nothing is spent, which is why puddings of this kind appear over and over in the compiled community and "reliable" recipe collections of the period, usually with a note about raisins for variety. The grated lemon rind is the one small luxury, and a common one — one of several flavourings, alongside spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon, that turn up in milk puddings of the period.