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Fruit Rice Pudding
cup chopped nuts cup chopped figs cup sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon +teaspoon nutmeg 1-41-2 Put 2 cups of boiled rice in a baking dish, add 2 cups sweet milk, the sugar, chopped dates, figs and nuts, season with cinnamon and nutmeg. Bake until brown. 2 cups stale bread crumbs 1 cup milk ½ cup sugar 2 eggs Serve with a lemon sauce.
A baked rice pudding built from already-cooked rice, sweetened and spiced and enriched with dried fruit and nuts. The method is sound; the quantities need a cook's judgement.
- The fruit and nut amountsThe ingredient list has lost its fractions, so the quantities for nuts, figs and sugar cannot be read with confidence. A workable set for 2 cups cooked rice is 1/2 cup chopped nuts, 1/2 cup figs, 1/2 cup dates and 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, adjusted to how sweet the fruit is.
- DatesThe method calls for chopped dates although they are absent from the legible list. Include them; with figs and nuts they are what makes this a fruit pudding rather than a plain one.
- "Sweet milk"Period shorthand for ordinary fresh whole milk, distinguishing it from buttermilk or soured milk. Whole milk is right here; the pudding sets loosely and skim milk leaves it watery.
- Boiled riceCooked, cooled rice, not raw. Long-grain gives separate grains; short or medium grain breaks down and gives a creamier body. Leftover rice works well and is a likely intent.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F for 40 to 50 minutes, uncovered, until the custard is just set and the top has coloured. "Bake until brown" is the only doneness cue offered and it arrives at about the right moment.
- BindingWith no egg in the rice mixture the milk thickens only from the rice starch. If you want a firmer, sliceable pudding, one or two beaten eggs stirred into the milk will set it, at the cost of a looser texture.
- Lemon sauceThe recipe gives no formula. A common period type is a cornstarch sauce: 1 cup water, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon cornstarch cooked until clear, then the juice and grated rind of a lemon and a spoonful of butter off the heat.
- YieldRoughly a 1 1/2-quart dish, serving six.
Baked rice pudding was the thrifty end of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dessert cookery: it used up cooked rice and the tail of a bottle of milk, and it needed no pastry skill. Community and company cookbooks of this kind ran dozens of variations, and the dried-fruit-and-nut version probably owes something to the growing trade in packaged California dates and figs, which grocers were promoting as cheap sweetening and "food value," though how quickly they reached ordinary kitchens is hard to pin down. The pairing with a cooked lemon sauce is characteristic of the era, when a bland milk pudding was expected to arrive with something sharp poured over it.