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Currant Rice Pudding
843. Put half a pound of rice in a saucepan with a quart of milk. Dredge half a pound of Zante currants with flour, and stir them gradually in. Add four ounces of lump sugar rubbed on lemon, with the juice, and two ounces of butter in bits. When the rice is well swollen, mix with it gradually six or eight yolks of eggs well beaten; transfer it to a deep china dish, and put it in the oven for half an hour; sift powdered sugar on the top, and brown with a salamander. These quantities make a very large pudding.
A Victorian baked rice pudding, enriched with egg yolks after the rice has swollen. The hinge is the temperature of the rice when the yolks go in: too hot and they scramble into threads.
- Temper the yolksLet the cooked rice stop steaming aggressively before beating in the yolks, and add them in a thin stream while stirring. If the pan is still at a boil the yolks will set into visible strings rather than binding the pudding.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to put it in the oven for half an hour. A moderate oven of around 350F is a reasonable modern reading for that timing. Judge it done when the centre is just firm to a light press.
- Zante currantsThese are the small dried grapes sold simply as "currants" today, not fresh redcurrants and not raisins. The flour dredging is there to keep them suspended instead of sinking to the bottom.
- Sugar rubbed on lemonRubbing a lump of sugar over the zest to draw out the oil is the old method for what is now called oleo-saccharum. Four ounces of granulated sugar with the finely grated zest of one lemon, rubbed together with the fingers, gives the same result.
- Rice and liquidHalf a pound of rice to a quart of milk is roughly 1 cup rice to 4 cups milk by volume. Use a short or medium grain rice, which swells and releases starch; long grain stays separate and the pudding will not hold together.
- SalamanderA salamander was an iron plate heated in the fire and held over the surface to glaze it. A broiler set high, watched constantly, does the same job in a minute or two.
- YieldThe note about a very large pudding is borne out by the quantities: allow for a deep dish of two to three quarts. Halving the quantities should work, with a somewhat shorter bake.