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Rice Pie
Mrs. A. S. Ewing.
One quart of milk, boiled; one small teacup of rice, flour mixed in a little cold milk; add to the boiling milk two tablespoons of butter; when cold, add five eggs well beaten; sweeten to taste; flavour with vanilla, and bake.
This is a rice-flour custard, closer to a baked pudding than to a pastry pie, and the original leaves several things unsaid. Read the ingredient line carefully before you start.
- Rice or rice flourThe comma in "one small teacup of rice, flour mixed in a little cold milk" is almost certainly a typesetting artefact: it means rice flour, slaked in cold milk and stirred into the boiling milk as a thickener. Whole rice grains would not behave this way, and a teacup of raw rice in a quart of milk would give a solid mass rather than a custard.
- A small teacupTeacup measures were not standardised; nineteenth-century sources put a teacup anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz, and a "small" one at the lower end. For a quart of milk, treating it as about half a cup of rice flour by volume gives a pourable but distinctly thickened base.
- Let it cool before the eggsThis is the hinge. Five beaten eggs stirred into milk still near the boil will scramble on contact. Cool the thickened milk to lukewarm, or at minimum temper the eggs with a ladleful first.
- BakeThe original gives no oven heat at all. For a custard of this kind, a modern moderate oven of 325 to 350F works: it is set when the edge is firm and the centre still trembles slightly, roughly 45 minutes to an hour depending on depth.
- A water bath helpsA roasting tin of hot water around the dish keeps the custard from curdling at the sides before the middle sets.
- Crust or no crustNo pastry is given, so the dish can be baked as a pudding or in a lined plate. The quantity here fills a deep 9-inch dish, or two ordinary pie shells. If using pastry, blind-bake it lightly first, since the wet filling will otherwise soak it.
- Sweetening"Sweeten to taste" for a quart of milk and five eggs generally lands between half and three-quarters of a cup of sugar. Add it to the milk while warm so it dissolves fully.
- YieldAbout eight servings. It is best cool rather than cold, and does not keep well past two days.
Rice pies belong to a large family of thickened milk custards that ran through English and American cookery, in which a starch, rice, sago, breadcrumb, and later tapioca or arrowroot, stretches a small number of eggs across a large quantity of milk. Rice flour was cheap and shelf-stable, and the starch helps the custard set. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s, is generally counted among the earliest American community fundraising cookbooks and gathered contributions from named local women, which is why this recipe carries Mrs. A. S. Ewing's name. It assumes a good deal: the proportions are given and little else.