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Common Baked Rice Pudding
842. Put half a teacupful of rice in a dish, with a pint of skim or new milk, a little sugar, and nutmeg or lemon-peel to be added, with, if preferred, a small slice of butter or dripping, or a few pieces of suet put on the top. Bake slowly, and stir it occasionally at first, to prevent the rice from burning to the bottom. If required to turn out, the dish must be buttered. An egg is a great improvement to this pudding; and, if it is liked in a milky condition, less rice must be used. Another Baked Rice Pudding (richer). - Boil about two table-spoonsful of rice in water till just soft; then pour away the water and add a pint of new milk, a little nutmeg, lemon-peel, and sugar; then boil again, and, when just off the boil, add the yolk and whites of nearly three eggs; bake and serve with sugar sifted over it.
Two versions of the same dish: a plain nursery pudding baked from raw rice, and a richer custard-set one built on rice already boiled soft. Both depend on long, gentle heat rather than any clever technique.
- "Bake slowly"In modern terms a low oven, somewhere around 300F (150C), at which the plain version will probably need 1.5 to 2 hours for the raw rice to swell and soften. Rushing it in a hotter oven sets a skin and leaves the grains chalky.
- The measurementsA Victorian teacupful is usually reckoned at about 5 to 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful of rice is roughly 6 tablespoons, or 2.5 to 3 oz. With a pint of milk that gives a firm, sliceable pudding; the note about a "milky condition" simply means using less rice.
- Pint sizeThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz, about 2.5 US cups. Using a 16 fl oz US pint will give a noticeably stiffer result.
- Which riceUse short-grain pudding rice or Arborio, not long-grain. The starch that thickens the milk is the whole point, and a long-grain rice will leave the pudding thin and the grains separate.
- New milk and skim"New milk" is fresh whole milk straight from the cow; whole milk is the equivalent. Skim will work but produces a thinner, less creamy set, which may be part of why the recipe offers butter, dripping or suet on top.
- The stirringStir once or twice during the first half hour only. After that the surface needs to be left alone to brown, and the raw rice has swollen enough that it will no longer settle and scorch.
- Eggs in the richer version"Nearly three eggs" probably means three with a little held back; three medium eggs to a pint of milk is a standard custard ratio. Add them once the milk is off the boil, whisking a little hot milk into the beaten eggs first, or they may scramble.
- YieldEither version fills a 1 to 1.5 quart baking dish and serves three or four. Butter the dish generously if you intend to turn it out, and let it stand ten minutes before doing so.
Baked rice pudding is the plainest form of a dish that entered English cookery as a luxury: rice was an imported commodity handled alongside spices in the medieval and early modern periods, and early rice puddings were thickened, spiced, enriched with eggs and cream, and served at good tables. By the nineteenth century imported rice had become cheap enough to be common in institutional and working-class kitchens, and something of that shift can be read in this entry. The first version is frugal, with dripping or suet standing in for butter and skim milk permitted; the second is set with eggs and made with new milk. Nutmeg and lemon peel are common English flavourings for milk puddings in this period, and the instruction to bake slowly and stir at first would have answered the conditions of a coal-fired range, where the base of the oven ran hot.