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Rice Pudding
One-half cup rice, one and one-half pints of milk, one-half cup sugar, large pinch salt, one tablespoon lemon rind chopped fine. Put rice, washed and picked, sugar, salt and milk in quart pudding dish; bake in moderate oven two hours, stirring frequently first one and one-half hours, then allow it to finish cooking with light-colored crust, disturbing it no more. Eat cold with cream.
A baked, stirred rice pudding with no eggs — the milk and starch do all the thickening. The whole character of it depends on stirring for the first stretch and then leaving it strictly alone.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" here means 325-350F. At the lower end the milk is less likely to catch at the edges over two hours.
- The hinge: stop stirringStirring for the first hour and a half keeps the grains suspended and builds a creamy body. The final half hour undisturbed is what forms the pale skin on top, which is the point of the dish. Once you stop, do not go back in.
- MeasurementsOne and a half pints is 3 cups milk to 1/2 cup raw rice — a very loose ratio that reduces over two hours. Use whole milk; skim will not give the body the recipe assumes.
- Rice"Washed and picked" means rinsing and sorting out grit, chaff and broken grains, unnecessary with modern packaged rice. Use a medium- or short-grain white rice; long-grain stays separate and gives a thinner pudding, and quick-cooking rice breaks down badly over two hours.
- Lemon rindA tablespoon of finely chopped zest is assertive by modern standards. Zest with a rasp grater and take only the yellow; the white pith turns bitter over two hours of baking.
- DishA "quart pudding dish" is a 1-quart baking dish, which is nearly full at the start. A shallow 1.5-quart dish gives more surface for the crust and less risk of boiling over.
- Yield and servingServes four modestly. It is meant to be eaten cold with pouring cream, and it thickens considerably as it chills — expect to loosen it with a little milk if it sets too stiff overnight.
Baked rice pudding of this kind — rice, milk, sugar, long slow oven — is the plainest form of a dish that runs back through medieval European rice pottages, when rice was an imported luxury sweetened and spiced for the wealthy. By the late nineteenth century milled rice was cheap and shelf-stable, and the pudding had become a byword for economy: no eggs, no pastry, and two hours of oven heat that a coal range would have been producing anyway. It asks almost nothing of the cook except attention at the right moments. Lemon rind rather than nutmeg is the one flourish here, a lighter flavouring that suits eating the pudding cold.