Home › Left-Over Cereals › German Rice Pudding
German Rice Pudding
2 cups cold boiled rice 1/4 teaspoonful vanilla cup cream 1 cup apple sauce Sweeten the cream as liked, add the vanilla and a very little salt, and whip it. Mix this with the rice and place in a pudding-dish in alternate layers with the apple sauce, having rice on top. Serve
An assembly job rather than a baked pudding: cold rice, whipped sweetened cream and apple sauce layered in a dish and served as is. The whole thing depends on the rice being properly cold and the cream properly whipped.
- The cream quantity is unreadableThe original line prints as "cup cream" with the fraction lost in the type. Half a cup of cream, whipped, is about right to coat 2 cups of rice without drowning it; a full cup gives something closer to a fool. Start with half and add more if the mixture looks dry.
- Cream that will actually whipPeriod "cream" was unhomogenised, though its richness varied. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or more, well chilled, and stop at soft peaks so it still folds into the rice.
- Cold rice, and cold means coldWarm rice will collapse the cream. Rice straight from the refrigerator also seizes into lumps, so break it up with a fork before folding. Plain boiled white rice works best; the starchy grains left from a milk pudding are already too soft.
- Sweeten in two places"Sweeten as liked" applies to the cream only. Sweetened commercial apple sauce plus sweetened cream makes the dish cloying, so use unsweetened apple sauce and put roughly 2 tablespoons of sugar in the cream.
- Not a baked puddingNothing goes in the oven. "Pudding-dish" here is simply the vessel it is served from, and the layers should be visible, so a straight-sided glass dish suits it.
- Rest it, brieflyHalf an hour in the refrigerator lets the layers set enough to spoon out cleanly. Much longer and the cream begins to weep into the rice.
- YieldAbout 4 cups of finished pudding, serving four modestly. A dusting of cinnamon or a grating of nutmeg over the top layer of rice is in keeping with the German style the title claims.
This comes from the genre of thrift cookery that flourished either side of 1900, when a book could be built entirely around the contents of yesterday's saucepans. The "German" label attached loosely in English and American cookbooks of the period to sweet dishes involving apples, cream and vanilla, the same associations that produced German apple cake and German coffee cake, and it generally signalled a style rather than any traceable regional original. What makes the recipe characteristic of its moment is the reversal of effort: a rice pudding normally means an hour or more of slow baking, and here the baking is skipped entirely because the rice is already cooked. Apple sauce would have been a standing item in any household that put up autumn fruit, a thing simply on hand rather than something to be made.