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Pudding of Rice Meal
(Budino di farina di riso) Milk, one quart.
Rice meal, seven ounces.
Sugar, four and a half ounces.
Six eggs.
A pinch of salt.
Taste of vanilla.
First dissolve the rice meal in half a pint of the milk when cold, and pour it in the rest of the milk when it is boiling. This is done to prevent the formation of lumps. When the meal is cooked add the sugar, the butter and the salt . Remove from the fire and when it is lukewarm mix the eggs (beaten) and the taste of vanilla. Then bake the pudding like all the others and serve warm. 202
A stovetop rice-flour custard finished in the oven — closer to a baked semolina pudding than to English rice pudding, since no whole grains are involved. Two things in the original need filling in: the butter has no quantity, and "bake like all the others" assumes you have read the rest of the chapter.
- Rice mealThis is rice flour, not cracked or ground rice grains. Seven ounces is about 1 1/3 cups; use plain white rice flour, not glutinous (sweet) rice flour, which sets gummy.
- The missing butterButter appears in the method but never in the ingredient list. Something in the range of 1 to 2 ounces (2 to 4 tablespoons) suits this quantity of milk. The original gives no figure, so this is a guess rather than a conversion.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe. Rice flour whisked into hot milk seizes into lumps instantly. Dissolving it in half a pint (1 cup) of cold milk before it meets the boiling remainder is what keeps the texture smooth, and it is worth pouring the slurry in a thin stream while whisking.
- "When the meal is cooked"Reckon on 8 to 10 minutes of steady stirring after the slurry goes in, over low heat. The mixture should be thick enough to coat the spoon heavily and taste of cooked starch rather than raw flour.
- Cool before the eggsLukewarm means genuinely lukewarm — below about 120F. Six beaten eggs stirred into a near-boiling base will scramble in threads that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- "Bake like all the others"The book leaves this to the earlier pudding recipes and gives no temperature. A buttered mould set in a pan of hot water and a moderate oven (around 350F on a modern dial) will do the job; allow 45 minutes to an hour, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble.
- Vanilla"Taste of vanilla" could mean either a piece of vanilla bean infused in the milk or a few drops of extract. The recipe adds it with the eggs, so a teaspoon of extract is the closer reading; half a split pod steeped in the milk as it heats is an alternative.
- YieldA quart of milk and six eggs makes a substantial pudding — eight servings, or six generous ones. Served warm, as directed; it firms considerably as it cools.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) is generally taken to draw on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, and this budino has the marks of that kind of source: terse quantities in ounces, a cross-reference to earlier recipes rather than a repeated instruction, and the assumption that the cook already knows what a pudding mould and a water bath are. Budino covers a wide family of moulded, baked custards in Italian cookery, thickened variously with breadcrumbs, semolina, chestnut flour or — as here — rice flour, which gives a finer, less grainy set than semolina. Rice has been grown in the Po valley since the fifteenth century. Books like Gentile's were written for Italian-American households and for American cooks curious about Italian food at a moment when both audiences were expanding fast.