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Rice and Apple Pudding
The plain rice pudding preceding, made with only 4 pints of milk and 1 pound of good cooking apples, pared, cored and quartered.
Drop the quartered apples in the puddings, bake 3 or 4 hours and keep covered with buttered paper to prevent scorching, and black edges on the apples. An inch length of stick cinnamon to each pudding improves. Cream and sugar, or else hard sauce.
A variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the plain baked rice pudding from the preceding page in front of you, with the milk cut back to 4 pints and apples added. A few things need translating before it will work in a home oven.
- The base recipe is missing hereWhatever rice and other quantities the plain pudding calls for stay on the preceding page; only the milk (4 pints, 8 cups) and apples (1 lb) are given here. For a slow-baked rice pudding on that scale, roughly a cup of uncooked short-grain rice to 8 cups milk is a common ratio — but without the original base recipe, treat the proportions as unresolved rather than guessing.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A 3-to-4-hour bake implies gentle heat; something in the region of 300F, lower if your oven runs hot, is a reasonable modern starting point. Anything brisker risks setting the custard and driving off the milk before the rice has softened and swelled.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment as a cover rather than a sealed lid; the text does not say whether it rests on the pudding or over the dish. Either way it is there to stop the apple pieces drying and scorching at the edges. Foil works but traps more steam.
- The applesA pound of a firm cooking apple — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy — quartered, not sliced, as the recipe specifies. Quarters hold their shape over three hours; thin slices dissolve into the rice.
- Stick cinnamonA one-inch piece of whole stick per pudding, pushed down into the milk and fished out before serving. Ground cinnamon will cloud the pudding rather than perfume it cleanly.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, usually flavoured with brandy or vanilla, chilled firm and served in a spoonful on the hot pudding so it melts. It is the richer of the two options given; cream and sugar is the everyday one.
Baked rice puddings of this kind were among the cheapest sweets a nineteenth-century kitchen could produce: milk, rice and a long stay in the cooling oven after the day's bread came out. That last point explains the three- or four-hour bake, which looks extravagant now but made use of heat the oven was giving up anyway. Adding apples — and cutting the milk from the plain version's larger quantity — is the standard way these books extend a base recipe into a whole family of puddings, and rice with apple and cinnamon is a pairing common across English, German and American household cookery of the period. Hard sauce, the alternative accompaniment, is the same butter-and-sugar paste served with plum pudding at Christmas, and its appearance here marks this as a dish that could be dressed up for company or served plain with cream on a Tuesday.