Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Rice and Tapioca Pudding
Rice and Tapioca Pudding
Put in a little more than one-half teacupful of rice (without its being washed) into a deep pie-dish, and add a little less than one-half teacupful of tapioca. Mix these together well, add one-half teacupful of crushed loaf sugar, pour over six breakfast cupfuls of milk, and sprinkle over a small quantity of ground cinnamon or grated nutmeg. Place the dish in a slack oven, bake for about four hours, take it out, and serve.
A long, slow milk pudding of the old English nursery type, set down in Oscar's book with the vagueness of a cook who assumed you had made one before. The proportions look thin on paper; four hours in a cool oven is what turns them into pudding.
- The measuresA teacupful is about 6 fl oz, a breakfast cupful about 8-10 fl oz. That gives roughly 3/8-1/2 cup rice, a scant 3/8 cup tapioca, 3/8 cup sugar and something between a quart and a half and two quarts of milk.
- Slack ovenA slack or very slow oven is 250-300F. Anything hotter will boil the milk, curdle it against the sides of the dish, and drive the liquid off long before the rice softens.
- The dishA "deep pie-dish" here is a deep baking dish rather than a pie plate. Allow a vessel comfortably larger than the two quarts or so of milk, and a broad surface, since that is what forms the brown skin.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in hard cones and broken up with nippers before use. Plain granulated sugar is the direct replacement, measure for measure.
- TapiocaPeriod tapioca meant pearl or flake, which swells slowly and holds its shape over a long bake. Modern instant or minute tapioca is pre-cooked and will dissolve into paste in the first hour; use pearl tapioca if you want the result described.
- Do not wash the riceThe instruction is deliberate. The surface starch helps thicken the milk, and rinsing it away leaves a thinner pudding. Use a short or medium grain rice.
- StirringThe recipe calls for none; it is put in the oven and taken out four hours later.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of finished pudding. It thickens considerably as it cools and is good cold the next day.
Baked rice puddings of this kind were standing nursery and boarding-house food in nineteenth-century Britain, and they arrived in American cookbooks largely unchanged: rice, sugar, a great deal of milk, spice on top, and hours in the falling heat of an oven that had already done its real work. The tapioca is the more interesting addition. Cassava starch reached European and American kitchens in quantity through the nineteenth-century tropical trade and was marketed as a light, digestible thickener suitable for invalids and children, which is roughly the register this pudding occupies. Its presence in a book bearing the name of the Waldorf's most famous maitre d'hotel is a reminder that a great hotel kitchen turned out plain food as well as terrapin and canvasback: staff meals, children's suppers, and the sort of dish a guest asked for when they wanted nothing elaborate.