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Rice Flour and Milk
Pour half pint boiling water and half pint boiling milk into a small saucepan with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; add four ounces rice flour, briskly stir with a wooden spoon and slowly cook for ten minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile, and serve with cold milk and powdered sugar separately.
A rice-flour porridge of the plainest sort, closer to nursery pap than to dessert. The whole of it depends on how you introduce the flour to the liquid.
- The hinge: add the flour off the boil, in a streamOn adding the flour -- The recipe directs you to add the rice flour to the boiling liquid and stir briskly with a wooden spoon. Rice flour added to rolling liquid can seize into lumps, so if you are unsure, draw the pan off the heat, rain the flour in while stirring, then return it to low heat.
- Half a pintIn American measure that is one cup, so two cups of liquid in all, half water and half milk. A British half pint is closer to 10 fl oz, which gives a looser porridge; either works.
- Four ounces rice flourWeigh it if you can: about 115 g, or roughly three-quarters of a cup. Rice flour packs unevenly, so the volume figure is the less reliable of the two.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground is markedly duller and this dish has nothing else in it.
- Ten minutes is a minimum, not a maximumRice flour needs sustained heat to lose its raw, chalky taste. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir often, since it catches on the bottom readily; fifteen minutes does no harm.
- Rice flour, not sweet rice flourUse plain white rice flour. Glutinous (sweet) rice flour, sold for mochi, behaves quite differently and will give a sticky, elastic mass.
- Yield and servingEnough for two as a breakfast or supper dish, or four small portions. It is served hot with cold milk and sugar passed at the table, so keep it a shade looser than you want it in the bowl -- it thickens as it stands.
Rice-flour gruels of this kind belong with the invalid and nursery cookery of the older books, where blandness was the point rather than the failing: a thin farinaceous porridge, easily digested, served with cold milk and sugar so the eater could adjust it. Rice flour was valued in European kitchens for its neutrality, and was used to thicken soups and blancmanges where wheat flour would have carried too much flavour. A plain dish like this is a reminder that such volumes gathered household staples alongside more elaborate set pieces; the nutmeg is the one flourish, and grated nutmeg on milk dishes is long-established in English cookery.