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Plain Rice Pudding (Form a paste pour on it one)
form a paste, pour on it one quart of scalding milk, then add a small slice of butter and four eggs well beaten; flavour with nutmeg, lemonpeel, bitter almonds, and sugar. Be careful to stir the barley well while pouring on it the boiling milk, and not to put in the eggs till the mixture is cold. The eggs must also be well mixed in. Bake one and a half hour in a slow oven.
Another.-Pour boiling water upon two ounces of pearl barley the evening before; next morning put it into a saucepan with a quart of milk, and a small piece of butter, and some moist sugar. Let it simmer over the fire five or six hours, then put it into a pie-dish and brown it before the fire for a quarter of an hour. It should be nearly as thick as custard, but not solid.
Two barley puddings, printed one after the other: a baked custard-style pudding and a long-simmered version finished under heat. The first carries a flavouring that is no longer permissible in a domestic kitchen.
- Bitter almondsThe first pudding is flavoured with bitter almonds, which contain amygdalin and release hydrogen cyanide when crushed and moistened. Unprocessed bitter almonds are not sold as food in the United States and are restricted elsewhere; the dose in a family pudding is not reliably safe, particularly for children. Use a current recipe if you want an almond-scented baked pudding.
- Why the quantity mattersThis recipe gives no quantity for the bitter almonds at all, and the strength of an individual nut varies. There is no safe reading of an unmeasured quantity, which is why the instruction cannot simply be scaled down.
- Pearl barley, not riceDespite the heading, both preparations are barley puddings; the first tells you to 'stir the barley well' as the milk goes on. Pearl barley is barley with the hull and bran polished off.
- The second version stands aloneThe "Another" recipe contains no almonds: two ounces of pearl barley, a quart of milk, butter and moist sugar, simmered until thick. Moist sugar is an unrefined soft brown sugar; light brown sugar is the nearest thing on a shelf today.
- Five or six hours of simmeringThat length of time over an open fire assumed gentle, indirect heat. On a modern hob, milk and starch left that long will catch and scorch unless the pan is heavy, the heat very low and the mixture stirred often; a low oven or a double boiler behaves more like the original hearth.
- Browning before the fire"Before the fire" means radiant heat on the surface only, which a grill or broiler reproduces. A quarter of an hour under a modern grill is far too long; watch it and pull it when the top is freckled.
- The texture to aim forThe instruction that the pudding be "nearly as thick as custard, but not solid" is the real test. Barley keeps absorbing liquid as it cools, so stop while it still pours.
Barley was the everyday grain of British cookery long before rice became cheap, and milk puddings thickened with it survived well into the nineteenth century as invalid food and nursery food, prescribed for their supposed mildness. Barley water, made by the same soaking-and-simmering method minus the milk, was standard sickroom drink in the same households. Bitter almonds appear in books of this period as a cheap source of the flavour we now get from almond extract; their toxicity was known but treated casually, and they largely disappeared from the domestic pantry in the twentieth century.