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Poor Man's Pudding
4 cups milk 1/2 cup rice 1/3 cup molasses ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon cinnamon 1 tablespoon butter Wash rice, mix and bake same as Rice Pudding. At last stirring, add butter.
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it gives only the changes to be made to the book's baked Rice Pudding, and even that ingredient list has come down to us truncated. Read it alongside the parent recipe rather than on its own.
- The list is incompleteAs printed, the entry names only salt, cinnamon and butter. The rice, milk and sugar come from the Rice Pudding recipe it points back to; check that parent recipe for the quantities.
- The salt looks high1½ teaspoons is a great deal of salt for a milk pudding of this size; treat the figure with suspicion and salt to taste. The cinnamon at 1½ teaspoons is plausible but assertive.
- "Bake same as Rice Pudding" means slow and longThe parent recipe governs the oven and the timing, and this style of pudding is baked slowly for a long stretch. There is no precooking of the rice: it swells in the milk.
- Stirring is the hingeThe entry assumes the parent recipe's stirring instructions, which bring the rice up off the bottom where it settles early in the bake and then leave the pudding alone to set.
- When to add the butterThe tablespoon of butter goes in at the last stirring, roughly an hour in, so it melts through the milk rather than sitting as a slick on top.
- RiceUse a plain medium- or long-grain white rice. Converted or parboiled rice will not release enough starch to thicken the milk, and arborio makes the thing gluey.
- YieldDepends on the parent recipe's quantities; it is served warm or cold, and it thickens noticeably as it cools.
"Poor man's" attached itself to any number of nineteenth-century dishes that stretched a small quantity of grain with milk and long, unattended oven time — the phrase signals cheapness rather than any particular ingredient, and turns up on puddings, gravies and cakes alike. Baked rice pudding of this sort belongs to the class of recipes that suited a coal or wood range perfectly: the pudding could go into the cooling oven after the day's baking and look after itself for three hours.