Rice Pudding
4 cups milk 1/3 cup rice 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup sugar Grated rind 1/2 lemon Wash rice, mix ingredients, and pour into buttered pudding-dish; bake three hours in very slow oven, stirring three times during first hour of baking to prevent rice from settling. 4 cups milk ½ cup rice ½ cup molasses
A baked custard-style rice pudding in the Farmer manner: no eggs, no precooked rice, just milk and grain left to swell in a cool oven until the starch does the thickening. The two ingredient lists are the plain version and a molasses variant.
- Very slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; a very slow oven is usually reckoned at roughly 250-275F. Anything hotter and the milk skins over and scorches at the edges before the rice has softened, which is the whole reason for the three-hour bake.
- The second listThe printed page was checked: the second list gives half a cup of rice and half a cup of molasses to 4 cups of milk, with molasses standing in for the sugar and lemon of the first version. That is a stiffer, sweeter pudding than the first; a cup and a half of rice in the same milk would set solid.
- Rice typeUse a short or medium grain white rice; round "pudding rice" releases the starch that thickens the milk. Long grain works but stays separate and gives a thinner pudding, and parboiled or converted rice releases far less starch and will thicken poorly.
- MilkWhole milk. Skim or low-fat will give a watery pudding with a rubbery skin, and the recipe has no eggs or cream to compensate.
- The stirringThree stirs in the first hour is the instruction that matters. The rice sinks and cements to the bottom otherwise. After the first hour leave it alone so the brown skin can form on top.
- Pudding-dish sizeUse a 1.5- to 2-quart baking dish. The mixture is thin at the start and needs headroom, since it barely thickens until the last hour.
- Doneness and yieldDone when the rice is tender and the milk has thickened to a loose custard that still trembles; it firms considerably as it cools. Serves 4 to 6, warm or cold.
Baked rice puddings of this type were standard economy cookery in nineteenth-century New England: a third of a cup of rice and a quart of milk fed a family, and the long slow bake could ride along in a coal range that was already hot for other work. Fannie Farmer's version is stripped down, with no eggs and no raisins, relying on the starch of the grain to bind the milk — the same principle as a Scandinavian or English nursery pudding. The molasses variant uses the older, cheaper sweetening, long a staple in Boston kitchens through the West Indies trade.