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Poor Man's Pudding
A quart of milk, half tea-cup rice, salt to taste, and one tea-cup sugar (some add table-spoon butter); place in oven while cold, stirring occasionally while the rice is swelling. Bake quite slowly two hours or more. It should be cream-like when done, and must be taken immediately from oven. A good test is to tip dish; if rice and milk move together it is done; if not sufficiently cooked the milk runs; if neither move it is done too much. To vary this, a small cup raisins and a tea-spoon lemon or vanilla may be added. This is a delicious pudding when properly baked, and may be eaten warm or cold with sugar or cream. - Mrs. Louise Lincoln, New Rutland, Ill.
A baked rice pudding with no eggs, no crust and almost no work — the whole thing depends on a genuinely slow oven and on pulling it out at the right moment.
- Set the oven at 300FSet the oven low -- the recipe gives no temperature, and "bake quite slowly" points to what would now be a slow oven, somewhere around 300F. Much hotter and the milk will skin and scorch at the edges long before the rice has swelled and released its starch.
- Teacup measuresA nineteenth-century teacup is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz rather than 8, though the usage was never standardised. On that reading the half teacup of rice is about 3 fl oz (6 tablespoons, a generous 1/3 cup) and the teacup of sugar about 3/4 cup; some may prefer to cut the sugar to half a cup for modern taste.
- Rice and milkUse short- or medium-grain white rice, unrinsed, so the starch stays on it and thickens the milk. Whole milk is essential; skim or plant milks will not set to the "cream-like" texture and will separate.
- Start cold, as writtenPutting the dish in while cold is deliberate — the slow rise in temperature lets the grains absorb milk instead of setting a skin over raw rice. Use a wide, shallow baking dish of about 2 quarts.
- The stirring, then the skinStir every 20 to 30 minutes for the first hour or so to keep the rice from settling into a solid raft on the bottom. Stopping the stirring for the last half hour will give a browned skin, though the recipe itself asks only for a cream-like pudding.
- The doneness test is the recipeTipping the dish is a reliable check: milk running ahead of the rice means underdone, nothing moving at all means the starch has set solid and it will be pasty when cold. You want the two sliding together as one loose custard. It firms noticeably as it cools, so err on the loose side.
- Take it out at onceA pudding left in a cooling oven keeps thickening. Remove it the moment the test reads right rather than letting it coast.
- YieldA quart of milk gives six modest servings. Raisins are best stirred in during the last 30 minutes so they plump rather than dissolve; vanilla or lemon goes in at the same point, since long baking drives off the aroma.
Baked rice puddings of this kind — milk, a little rice, sugar, long slow heat, no eggs — were the cheapest sweet dish a nineteenth-century kitchen could produce, which is generally said to be where the name comes from; "poor man's" appears throughout American and British cookbooks attached to any dish that imitated a richer one with fewer ingredients. What made it practical was the cast-iron cookstove with a firebox banked low overnight or through an afternoon of other baking: two hours of gentle background heat that likely cost little or nothing extra. The recipe comes from the kind of collection compiled from contributed household recipes, full of signed submissions from ordinary cooks — Mrs. Lincoln of New Rutland, Illinois, among them — which is why the instructions read as practical advice rather than formal method, right down to the trick of tipping the dish to judge doneness by eye.