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Flavoring (Eggs tablespoonfuls cornstarch)
2 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls cornstarch Little salt Beat yolks of eggs and mix with rice, sugar, and salt.
Mix corn-starch with a little of the milk.
Heat remainder, stir blended corn-starch into it and let boil a few minutes, stirring constantly. Put into double boiler and stir rice mixture into it.
Cook until it begins to thicken, remove from fire, I 141 add flavoring (lemon or vanilla), and pour into dish. Beat whites of eggs with two tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, spread over top, and place dish in oven to brown meringue.
A left-over rice pudding thickened with cornstarch and finished under a meringue. The printed ingredient list has been mangled — only the eggs, cornstarch and salt survive — so the quantities of rice, milk and sugar have to be reconstructed from the method.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for rice, milk and sugar that the ingredient list never gives. Proportions in comparable puddings of the period run to about 2 cups cooked rice, 2 cups milk and 1/3 cup sugar for 2 eggs and 2 tablespoons cornstarch; treat that as a reasonable reconstruction, not the original figure.
- The stray "I 141"Almost certainly a stray page number or running head picked up by the scanner mid-sentence, not an instruction or a measure. Read the line as "remove from fire, add flavoring."
- Cornstarch must boilThe blended cornstarch and milk have to reach a full boil for a minute or two or the starch will not gelatinize and the pudding will thin out as it stands. Stir constantly; scorched milk at the bottom flavours the whole dish.
- Why the double boilerOnce egg yolks and rice go in, direct heat risks curdling the yolks, though the cornstarch already in the mixture gives some protection. Cook only until it visibly thickens, then take it off the heat; the recipe gives no temperature.
- Cooked rice, not rawThe rice is already boiled; nothing in the method cooks it. Cold, firm leftover rice generally holds its shape better than freshly cooked, which breaks down more readily. Break up clumps with a fork before adding.
- Oven for the meringue"Place dish in oven to brown" gives no temperature; a moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350F, held only long enough to set and colour the peaks, is a workable equivalent. A broiler will colour it in two minutes but leaves the interior of the meringue slack.
- Meringue techniqueBeat the whites to soft peaks before adding the two tablespoons of powdered sugar, then to stiff and glossy. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all the way round, which stops it shrinking away as it bakes.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities, four to six servings; the original gives neither a yield nor a dish size. Best eaten the day it is made; the meringue weeps in the refrigerator.
Rice pudding with a meringue lid is the standard nineteenth-century answer to the question of what to do with the pot of boiled rice left from dinner, and it belongs to the same family as queen of puddings, where breadcrumbs stand in for the rice. The structure is economical in a very deliberate way: the yolks thicken the custard, the whites become the topping, and nothing is wasted. Cornstarch appears here as an insurance policy: cooks used it to guarantee a set that egg yolks alone might not deliver over uncertain stove heat. The choice of lemon or vanilla for flavouring reflects what was reliably on the shelf.