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Cream Rice Pudding
3 tablespoons rice
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon or nut- 1 quart milk meg
Wash the rice thoroughly, add the other ingredients and pour into a greased baking-dish. Bake for three hours in a slow oven, stirring several times during the first hour. The mixture should not boil. Serve either hot or cold.
This is the old-fashioned creamy pudding which has such a delicious flavor because of the long slow cooking. One-half cup of raisins may be added, if desired.
A baked rice pudding with no eggs and no thickener beyond the starch the rice gives up over three hours. The whole character of it depends on holding the oven low enough that the milk never simmers.
- Slow ovenPeriod usage puts this somewhere around 275-325F; the low end of that range is safest here. Push the heat much higher and the milk is liable to bubble at the edges and go grainy rather than creamy.
- The hinge: do not let it boilThe instruction "the mixture should not boil" is the recipe. If you see movement in the surface, drop the heat or move the dish to a lower shelf. Slow evaporation and released rice starch are what thicken it.
- Rice to milk ratioThree tablespoons of rice to a quart of milk looks impossibly thin in the dish and it is meant to. Use a short or medium grain white rice; long grain releases less starch, and converted or parboiled rice releases less still, so expect a thinner result.
- SugarOne tablespoon to a quart is barely sweet by current tastes. Two to four tablespoons will suit a modern palate better.
- MilkWhole milk. Skim or 2% will not build the creaminess the title promises, and ultra-pasteurized milk tends to give a slightly cooked, flat flavor over three hours.
- StirringStir several times in the first hour to keep the rice from settling into a solid layer at the bottom, then leave it alone.
- Dish and yieldA quart of milk needs a 1.5- to 2-quart baking dish; it will not rise but it needs headroom against a boilover. Serves four to six.
- RaisinsAdd them in the last hour if you use them. Three full hours in hot milk leaves them collapsed and washed out.
Baked rice pudding of this kind — rice, milk, sugar, spice, and time — is the plain descendant of the medieval and early modern rice pottages that were made with almond milk or broth, the almond milk being a fasting-day substitution for dairy. By the time this book appeared, rice was an inexpensive staple in American kitchens and puddings like this one were valued precisely because they cost almost nothing and required no attention beyond an occasional stir. The recipe's insistence on "long slow cooking" probably reflects a coal or wood range with a cooling oven after the day's baking, where a dish could be set in residual heat for the afternoon; the note that this is "the old-fashioned creamy pudding" suggests the author already saw quicker, egg-thickened versions displacing it.