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Flimsy
2 pints (4 cups) milk 4 tablespoonfuls sugar 6 tablespoonfuls apricot jam 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 gill (1/2 cup) cream 1/2 lb. (I cup) rice 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 3 eggs Put the milk into a saucepan, with one tablespoonful of the sugar and the salt, and bring to the boiling point. Mix the rice with the remainder of the sugar and cream. Add the boiling milk and cook until tender. Take from the fire, add the beaten yolks of the eggs and pour into a buttered pudding dish, leaving it for an hour in a cool place. Spread the jam over the top. Beat up the whites of the eggs, add the extract and spread on the top of the pudding.
Sprinkle over with a little sugar and bake in a moderate oven for five minutes.
A rice pudding built in three layers — creamy rice, apricot jam, meringue — with a very short final bake. The measurements are mostly given in both old and modern terms, but a few points need attention.
- The gillA gill is half a cup, as the recipe itself notes. The full liquid load is 4 cups milk plus 1/2 cup cream to 1 cup rice, which cooks down to a loose, spoonable pudding rather than a stiff one.
- The riceUse a short- or medium-grain white rice; long-grain stays separate and will not give the creamy body the dish depends on. 1/2 lb is closer to 1 1/4 cups by volume than 1 cup, so weigh it if you can.
- Cooking the riceMilk and sugar scorch readily. Cook over low heat with frequent stirring, or set the pan in a wider pan of simmering water. Expect 30 to 45 minutes for the grains to go tender.
- Adding the yolksTake the pan off the heat and temper — stir a ladle of the hot rice into the beaten yolks first, then return the mixture. Dropped in cold, the yolks will scramble in threads through the pudding.
- The hour in a cool placeThis is not optional. The pudding must set enough to carry the jam without the jam sinking. A refrigerator does the job faster than the 1900s larder; an hour is still about right.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as about 350F. Five minutes at that heat only colours the meringue lightly and leaves the whites soft; if you want them set through, longer at a lower heat (around 325F) will do it, and pasteurised whites remove the question altogether.
- The meringueThree whites with no added sugar beaten in makes a foam that weeps quickly. Beat to soft peaks, fold in a tablespoon or two of the sprinkling sugar, and serve within the hour.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a 2-quart dish. Best warm or barely cool; refrigeration firms the rice and dulls the meringue.
The name is the puzzle here. It may be a playful English kitchen corruption of flummery — the old name for a soft set pudding, itself borrowed from the Welsh llymru, a soured oatmeal jelly. Whatever the etymology, the construction is characteristic of late-nineteenth-century English nursery cookery: a starch base cooked in milk, a layer of jam, a meringue lid, and a few minutes in the oven to colour it. Queen of Puddings uses breadcrumbs in the same three-tier arrangement, and the pattern let a cook turn a plain milk pudding into something worth carrying to the table with a spoonful of preserve and three eggs already in the house.