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Plain Rice Pudding. Poor Man's Pudding, Etc
1 pint of rice. 1 pint of white sugar. 6 pints of milk. Ground cinnamon or nutmeg. Very little salt. 2 ounces of butter, optional. Wash the rice in three or four waters and divide it in two pudding pans. Mix the sugar, salt and cinnamon equally with it, then pour in the milk cold. Add the butter if the milk is not rich. Bake in a slow oven 3 or 4 hours. It may be best to use only 5 pints of milk at first, and add the other if the time allows the puddings to boil down dry enough. Scorching on top may be prevented by covering with paper previously greased. Almost any pudding sauce is suitable, and so is pure cream, but for preference, sauce doree or golden sauce may be taken; it gives the best appearance to so plain a pudding. People who are weary of the sameness of egg-laden and butter-soaked hotel puddings, and who like simple flavors, will appreciate the foregoing plain rice pudding and the following wholesome variations of the same.
A baker's-scale rice pudding with no eggs at all — the starch of the rice and the long slow bake do all the thickening. It works, but only at a genuinely low oven temperature.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperatures; read this as somewhere in the region of 275-325F, and err low. Too hot an oven risks the milk breaking and the surface scorching before the rice has softened and swelled.
- Pint measuresIngredients are measured by volume, not weight. A pint of rice is 2 cups (about 14 oz of raw long- or medium-grain rice); a pint of sugar is 2 cups; 6 pints of milk is 3 quarts. The proportion of liquid to rice is 6:1 by volume (5:1 if you start with 5 pints as the recipe suggests), which is what a three-hour bake requires.
- Pudding pansThe recipe divides the mixture between two pans but does not say why; the practical effect is a shallower layer, which should help the milk reduce evenly. Two 9x13 dishes or two 2-quart bakers are about the right order of size for roughly 3 1/2 quarts of mixture. Piled deep in one dish it will likely still be loose at four hours.
- Very little saltAbout 1/2 teaspoon for the whole batch. This is a sweet pudding, and the salt is only there to keep the milk from tasting flat.
- The butter clauseThe 2 ounces is insurance against thin milk. With whole milk it is unnecessary; with 2 percent, add it, and expect a leaner result regardless. Half-and-half in place of a pint of the milk gets closer to nineteenth-century "rich" milk.
- Holding back a pintThe advice to start with 5 pints and add the sixth later is sound and worth following. Judge at the two-hour mark: if the rice grains are still firm and the surface is already close to the rice, add the reserved milk warm so the bake does not stall.
- Greased paperA sheet of buttered parchment does exactly what is described; the recipe does not say whether it sits on the surface or over the dish, and either will shield the top. Foil works but traps more steam; if you use it, leave it loose. Removing the cover for the last 20 minutes will give a browned skin.
- Stir early, not lateNot in the original, but two or three stirs during the first hour keep the rice from settling into a solid raft at the bottom. After that leave it alone so the top can set.
- Sauce doreeGolden sauce; the recipe gives no formula, but the name in this period generally denotes a sweetened egg-yolk pudding sauce, thinned to a pouring consistency and served warm. Cream is the easier option and the recipe allows it, though it names the sauce as the preference.
- YieldThree quarts of milk and 2 cups of rice fills two pans and serves roughly 16 to 20. This is institutional quantity; halve or quarter it for a household.
Rice pudding without eggs is the oldest and cheapest form of the dish, and it is often said to be the origin of the name "poor man's pudding." Rice was cheap and shelf-stable, milk was the largest cost, and a pudding that needed nothing but a slow oven for three or four hours suited both farm kitchens and commercial bakeries. The closing remark about cooks and diners "weary of the sameness of egg-laden and butter-soaked hotel puddings" places this squarely in the world of the American hotel and restaurant kitchen, the milieu that produced this book: pastry departments turning out large-format desserts by the pan, where a plain pudding that reduced slowly in a cool oven cost almost nothing in labor or ingredients. The milk goes in cold and the whole thing simply bakes down — no pre-boiling of rice, no custard to temper, nothing to watch.