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Pudding (Cup of Rice Cooked)
3/4 Cup of Rice, Cooked and Seasoned 2 Tablespoons Butter Substitute 2 Cups Fresh Strawberries or Other Fruit 1 Cup Sugar White of 1 Egg Cream butter and sugar. Add the fruit, crushed. Mix well and add the white of egg, beaten stiff. Put the rice in the middle of the dish and pour the mixture around it. Serve hot or cold.
A cold fruit fool built around a mound of cooked rice, from the era of wartime butter and sugar substitution. One element of it does not survive modern food-safety practice.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded into a mixture that is never heated, and the dish is then "served hot or cold" — in practice cold. Raw shell egg carries a real risk of Salmonella, and a stiff foam stirred through crushed fruit sits at room temperature while it is assembled and served. This is the reason to make a current recipe instead.
- No cooking step at allNothing in the method applies heat. The rice is cooked in advance, the butter and sugar are creamed raw, and the fruit is used crushed. There is no point at which the egg reaches a temperature that would matter.
- "Butter Substitute"In books of this period the phrase generally covered oleomargarine, nut-oil compounds, or one of the branded vegetable shortenings sold when dairy butter was scarce and expensive.
- "Cooked and Seasoned" rice"Seasoned" here most likely means sweetened and salted rather than savoury seasoning, though the recipe does not say.
- Sugar quantityA full cup of sugar to two cups of fruit is sweeter than a modern strawberry fool, and the sugar is creamed with fat rather than dissolved, so it may stay slightly gritty.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest a small dessert for a few people. The rice is meant to sit as a mound in the centre of the dish with the fruit mixture poured around it, as the method directs.
The appearance of "butter substitute" rather than butter has sometimes been read as a sign of wartime conservation, when American home cooks were urged to conserve butter, sugar and wheat and substitutions were printed into recipes rather than left to the cook; but such substitutes appear in American cookery well before and after the First World War, so the phrase dates nothing on its own. The dish itself is a hybrid of two older ideas: one in which crushed fruit is beaten into something rich and served cold, and the thrifty habit of finding a second use for cooked rice. Beaten egg white as a lightener in uncooked desserts was ordinary practice at the time, and appears in fools, snows and whips throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery; the understanding that raw egg carried a specific bacterial risk came much later.