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Baked Rice Pudding
1 cup cooked rice I 1½ cups milk 2 eggs teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful butter 2 tablespoonfuls sugar Vanilla or nutmeg Seeded raisins Reheat rice, add melted butter, beaten eggs mixed with milk, and all other ingredients except flavoring. Cook five minutes in double boiler, add flavoring, put into buttered pudding-dish and bake twenty minutes, or until custard is "set." Serve warm or cold, plain or with preserve or jelly.
To Freshen up Rice or Bread Puddings Remove crust from yesterday's pudding and turn out into smaller dish. Add hot milk, and (to a bread pudding) fresh crumbs for top, dotted over with butter. Bake again. Rice pudding may be reheated with hot milk, or if to be served cold, covered with a meringue flavored with lemon-juice and browned.
A thrift custard built on rice already cooked, from a book whose whole purpose is yesterday's food. The instructions are sound; only the units and the missing oven temperature need attention.
- The transcriptionThe "I" at the start of several lines is a typeset 1: 1 cup cooked rice, 1 tablespoonful butter. The salt line has no numeral at all in the text as printed, so the quantity is uncertain; a full teaspoonful would be a lot by modern taste, and a quarter teaspoon is closer.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A custard pudding of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, and twenty minutes is realistic only in a shallow dish. In a deeper dish expect 30-40 minutes.
- Judging "set"The hinge of the dish. Pull it when the edges are firm and the centre still trembles; a knife slid in an inch from the rim should come out clean. Baked until firm all through, an egg custard curdles and weeps.
- Why the double boilerThe five minutes over water presumably takes the chill off and begins to thicken the custard so the oven time can be short. Stir it, and do not let it approach a simmer, or you risk scrambled egg in rice before it ever reaches the dish.
- RaisinsNo quantity given. A third of a cup suits this volume. Plumping them in hot water or a little of the milk first keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- Milk1½ cups of whole milk with two eggs gives a soft custard. Substituting part cream makes it richer but slower to set; skim milk makes it watery.
- YieldFour small servings, in a dish of about a quart.
- The reheating noteSound practice, with one caveat: a pudding held over should have been refrigerated, and the second baking should bring it fully hot through, not merely warm the surface. The meringue variation needs a hot oven, around 400F, for a few minutes only.
Rice pudding in English and American cookery long predates this book — baked rice and milk appears in eighteenth-century receipt collections — and the version here, which begins not with raw rice but with rice already boiled for some earlier meal, has its own antecedents, since cold boiled rice was pressed into service in earlier cookery too. The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre of American domestic manuals that flourished around 1900, when scientific-cookery reformers were pressing housekeepers to treat waste as a moral and budgetary failing, and when the absence of reliable refrigeration in a middle-class kitchen may have been one practical reason among others to use up cooked starch quickly. The appended note on freshening yesterday's pudding is the book's method in miniature: the leftover of the leftover is itself given a second life, with hot milk to restore moisture and a meringue to disguise the fact that anything has been rescued at all.