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Rice Pudding with Stewed Fruit
Take two cups of rice pudding that has become very stiff when cold, and mix with it a cup of stewed and chopped tart prunes. Pile it lightly in a glass dish and serve it with the prune-juice, sweetened and thickened with a little corn-starch.
Other fruits than prunes may be used.
A reassembly rather than a recipe: cold rice pudding is loosened with fruit and dressed with a thickened syrup. The only thing that can go wrong is texture, so treat the pudding gently.
- What "very stiff when cold" meansBaked or stovetop rice pudding sets firm once chilled because the starch retrogrades. It should hold its shape on a spoon rather than pour.
- Pile lightly, do not stirThe hinge of the dish. Fold the chopped fruit through with a fork in a few strokes and heap it loosely; beating cold rice pudding smears the grains and turns the whole thing pasty.
- Stewed prunesDried pitted prunes simmered in water to cover, about 20 minutes, until plump. Keep the cooking liquid — that is the "prune-juice" the sauce is built from, not bottled prune juice.
- The cornstarch sauceAbout 1 teaspoon cornstarch slaked in cold water per cup of syrup. Bring to a boil and hold it there a full minute; underboiled cornstarch tastes raw and will not thicken properly.
- "Tart" fruit mattersRice pudding is bland and sweet, so the fruit carries the dish. Dried apricots, sour cherries, damsons or rhubarb all work; very sweet compotes leave it flat.
- ServingTwo cups of pudding plus fruit serves three or four. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep it cold — the syrup will weep into the rice if it stands.
- Glass dishPresumably specified for looks. Individual glasses or a shallow bowl do the same work.
Left-over cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often gave whole chapters to cooked cereals, because rice, oatmeal and hominy were cooked in quantity on a coal range and had to be used up before they soured. Rice pudding was a standard nursery and family sweet of the period — cheap, filling, and made with milk that also needed using — and cold, set pudding is unappealing on its own, so it was often rebuilt with fruit and a sauce and sent back to the table as something else. Prunes were a workhorse dried fruit of the era: shelf-stable, supplied in bulk from California and imported from France, credited with mild laxative virtue in the household-health writing of the day, and cheap enough that "stewed prunes" appeared at breakfast, in institutional menus and in desserts alike. The closing line, that other fruits may be used, is the real instruction here — the method is a template for whatever the cupboard held.