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Rice Pudding with Fruit
833. Swell the rice with a very little milk over the fire; then mix fruit of any kind with it (currants, gooseberries, scalded, pared, and quartered apples, raisins, or black currants); with one egg in the rice to bind it; boil it well, and serve with sugar.
A boiled pudding of the plainest Victorian sort, written for a cook who already knew the method and needed only the proportions of the idea. No quantities are given at all, so treat the line as a formula rather than a recipe.
- Quantities are not statedThe original gives no weight of rice, milk, fruit or sugar. A workable reading for a family-sized pudding is about 6 oz (170 g) pudding rice, milk to cover, one egg, and 8-12 oz of fruit, but this is an inference from comparable puddings of the period, not from the text.
- "Swell the rice"This means cooking the rice in just enough milk that it absorbs the liquid and softens, rather than boiling it loose in plenty of milk and draining. Keep the heat low and stir; rice on the base of a pan of milk scorches quickly.
- "Boil it well" means a cloth or basinThe pudding would be tied in a floured pudding cloth or packed into a greased basin, covered, and boiled in a pan of water. On the inferred quantities above, something in the region of 1.5 to 2 hours would be needed; the text gives no time. A modern cook may prefer a covered basin, which is easier to handle than a cloth.
- The egg is structuralOne egg is there only to bind, and it must go in once the rice has cooled enough not to scramble it. Add it while the rice is still hot from the pan and you will get threads of cooked egg through the pudding.
- "Scalded, pared and quartered apples"Scalding here probably means a brief plunge in boiling water, either to loosen the skin before paring or simply to soften the fruit; the text does not say which. A modern cooking apple will collapse into the rice, while an eating apple holds its shape better.
- Currants versus black currantsThe list distinguishes them: "currants" are dried currants, the small black raisins sold for cakes, while "black currants" are the fresh berries. Fresh gooseberries and blackcurrants are sharp and will need noticeably more sugar than the dried fruit versions.
- ServingSugar is the only sauce named, sprinkled over at table. Cream, or a thin sweet white sauce, is entirely in keeping. Expect six servings from the proportions above.
Boiled rice puddings belong to the era before the domestic oven was universal, when a pot of water over the fire was among the most reliable cooking arrangements in the house. Rice was an imported grain that grew steadily cheaper through the period, and by the middle of the nineteenth century rice pudding had settled into its long career as nursery and invalid food, praised in household manuals as light, digestible and economical. What is telling about this entry is the bracketed list: the compiler is not prescribing a dish so much as showing a cook how to absorb whatever fruit the garden or the market happens to be offering, from gooseberries through to apples, into a single reliable framework -- which may go some way to explaining the near-total absence of weights here.