Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Rice and Fruit Pudding
Rice and Fruit Pudding
Wash a small quantity of rice, and put it in a pie-dish in the oven with a little water; when the water has evaporated add to the rice a small quantity of milk, stir it and put it in again in the oven, stirring it now and again until it is soft, and adding more milk if required. A little sweet cream stirred in is an improvement. Fill a pie-dish almost full of fruit, sweeten it well, and then lay the rice unevenly over it in handfuls. Put it into the oven, bake until the rice is brown, and then serve.
Oscar gives no quantities and no temperatures, so this is a method rather than a formula. The hinge is the rice: it must be fully soft and creamy before it ever meets the fruit, because the final bake only browns the top.
- Working quantitiesFor a 2-quart dish, 3/4 cup of short- or medium-grain rice absorbs roughly 3 to 4 cups of milk in total, added in stages. Fruit: about 2 lb prepared, or 6 cups sliced.
- "Pie-dish"A pie-dish of this sort is generally a deeper oval or round earthenware baker with sloping sides rather than a shallow American pie plate. Any 2-quart ceramic or glass baking dish works; depth matters more than shape.
- Oven temperatureThe rice stage wants 300-325F, stirred every 15 minutes, and will take an hour to an hour and a quarter. The final browning bake wants 400-425F for 20 to 30 minutes.
- Rice typeChoose pudding rice, Arborio or another short-grain sort; long-grain and converted rice tend to stay separate and go creamy far less readily. Do not rinse away all the surface starch; as written, one quick wash is enough.
- Milk in stagesAdding milk a little at a time, as directed, is what makes this creamy rather than boiled-rice-in-milk. Whole milk is much the better choice; skim tends to give a thinner, more watery result.
- Sweetening the fruit"Sweeten it well" means to taste and to the fruit: 1/4 cup sugar for ripe peaches or berries, up to 3/4 cup for sour cherries, gooseberries or rhubarb stalks. Toss juicy fruit with a tablespoon of cornstarch or flour so the juices do not flood the rice.
- The handfulsLaying the rice on unevenly is deliberate — the peaks brown and crisp while the hollows let fruit juice bubble through. A smoothed layer bakes into a pale, uniform lid.
- YieldAbout six servings. Best served warm rather than hot, when the rice has settled but the fruit is still loose.
Baked milk-rice puddings were a fixture of English and American home cooking long before Oscar Tschirky set them down, and the two-stage method here — rice cooked slowly in milk, then a fruit layer beneath and a browned top — is essentially a nursery pudding dressed up for a dining room. It is a reminder that the 1896 Cook Book is not all terrapin and canvasback: alongside the grand dishes there are plain, thrifty ones, written in the loose, quantity-free style of a chef dictating to someone who already knows how rice behaves. The fruit would have been whatever the season gave — rhubarb and gooseberries in spring, cherries and peaches in summer, apples through the winter — and the recipe simply says "fruit", an omission of a piece with its omission of every other quantity and temperature.