Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Chapter XXI-Puddings and Pudding Sauces
Chapter XXI-Puddings and Pudding Sauces
R ICE PUDDING, No. 1-This is the old-fashioned, creamy pudding, than which there is none better. One quart of milk; three-fourths cup of sugar; three tablespoons of raw rice; one-half teaspoon of salt; one-half teaspoon of cinnamon. Mix the salt, spice and sugar well together, add to the rice and bake for three hours. Stir often for first hour. Bake slowly, that the mixture may not boil. Eat cold or hot without sauce. Add one-half cup of raisins if liked. RICE PUDDING, No. 2-One and one-half teacup of boiled rice; two-thirds teacup of raisins; two eggs; one-half teacup of sugar; one pint of milk; one-half teaspoon of salt; one-eighth teaspoon of cinnamon. Separate the whites and yolks of the eggs, add to the yolks two tablespoons of the milk, and place the rest of the milk on the fire in a double boiler. Wash and stone the raisins (or they may be left unseeded, if preferred), put them in the milk, and cook until soft and tender, which usually takes fifteen minutes. Add the rice, cook five minutes longer, and then stir in the yolks of the eggs and the salt, sugar and spice. Stir well, cook for two or three minutes, remove from the fire, and pour the pudding into the serving dish. Beat the whites of the eggs light, add to them one tablespoon of sugar, spread the froth on top of the pudding, and brown delicately in the oven. Serve cold.
Two versions of the same dish: the first is a slow-baked custard that makes itself, the second a stovetop pudding built on rice already cooked. Neither is difficult, but both depend on keeping the milk below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilFor No. 1, "bake slowly, that the mixture may not boil" is the whole technique. The recipe names no temperature; keep the oven low, somewhere in the region of 275-300F, since boiling curdles the milk and the pudding turns grainy instead of creamy.
- The milk is not in the mixing instructionNo. 1 lists a quart of milk and then never mentions it again. Combine the salt, sugar and cinnamon, stir them into the milk with the rice, and pour the lot into a buttered baking dish of about two quarts.
- Three tablespoons of rice is correctIt looks like far too little for a quart of milk. It is not — the grains swell over three hours and thicken the milk into something close to custard. Use a short or medium grain white rice; long grain and parboiled rice give up less starch and the result will be thinner.
- Stirring, and the skinStir often for the first hour so the rice does not settle and scorch on the bottom. After that, leave it alone; a brown skin forms on top.
- Teacup measureTeacup measures were not standardised, but a teacup is smaller than a modern mug and is commonly read as about 3/4 cup. On that reading No. 2 takes roughly 1 1/8 cups cooked rice, 1/2 cup raisins and 6 tablespoons sugar to a pint of milk.
- Stoning raisinsMuscat raisins then sold with their seeds in, hence the instruction to stone them. Ordinary seedless raisins need only a rinse, and 15 minutes in hot milk will plump them fully.
- Tempering the yolksThe two tablespoons of milk beaten into the yolks is a tempering step. Add the loosened yolks to the hot milk off the heat or over very low heat, then cook two or three minutes only — long enough to thicken, not long enough to scramble.
- Browning the meringue"Brown delicately" means a hot oven for a very short time, watched closely; the recipe gives no temperature. A broiler works but goes from pale to burnt in under a minute.
- YieldEither version serves four to six. No. 1 sets further as it cools, so if you want it loose and creamy, serve it warm.
Baked rice pudding of this kind belongs to the family of English milk puddings — rice, sago, tapioca, semolina — that turned cheap starch and a quart of milk into a filling sweet without eggs, pastry or much attention. Rice arrived in these puddings as an imported luxury and stayed as a staple; by the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book in the early twentieth century, alongside its dress patterns and household manuals for a largely middle-class readership, the dish was firmly domestic rather than grand. The two numbered versions here show the split that ran through such books: No. 1 is the slow, unsupervised oven method often said to suit a range kept hot all day, while No. 2 is a quicker double-boiler pudding that uses up rice left from an earlier meal and dresses it with a meringue. Cinnamon and raisins were common flavourings; nutmeg was another frequent choice.