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Caramel Rice Pudding
1/3 cupful rice. 1/2 teaspoonful lemon extract 3 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 cupfuls milk 1/4 cupful sultana raisins 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar ¼ cupful granulated sugar Melt granulated sugar in small saucepan and cook until brown, but do not burn; pour it while hot into pudding mold and spread it all over inside. Wash rice, parboil, drain, and cook slowly in milk thirty minutes; turn into basin, add powdered sugar, Crisco, salt, raisins, extract, and eggs well beaten and pour into prepared mold. Set mold in pan of boiling water and bake in oven till quite set. Turn out and serve hot or cold.
A caramel-lined baked rice custard, from the 1913 Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook. The printed ingredient list is missing the rice quantity, so read the points before starting.
- Missing rice measurementThe list gives no amount of rice, which is a genuine gap in the original rather than something to be inferred with confidence. For two cupfuls of milk, something in the region of a quarter to a half cup of raw short- or medium-grain rice is a reasonable guess.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the book exists to sell it. Two tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour here and behaves much the same in a custard.
- Caramel first, and quicklyMelt the quarter cup of granulated sugar dry over medium heat until it is the colour of dark honey, then pour it into the mold and tilt immediately. It sets hard in well under a minute, so have the mold at hand before the sugar colours.
- Powdered sugarIn 1913 this means finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Two tablespoons of ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the closer match.
- Parboil, then simmer in milkTwo or three minutes in boiling water rinses off surface starch so the milk does not turn to glue. Then thirty minutes at a bare simmer, stirred often, or the bottom scorches.
- Cool before the eggsLet the rice and milk drop below hand-hot before beating in the eggs, or they scramble. This step is unstated in the original.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no temperature, only 'bake in oven till quite set'; a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, suits it. In its water bath the pudding needs roughly 45 minutes to an hour, and is done when the centre barely trembles; a set, firm middle means it is already overcooked and weeping.
- UnmoldingRest ten minutes, run a knife round the edge and invert onto a rimmed dish. Much of the caramel will have loosened into a thin sauce, though some may cling to the mold.
- YieldAbout a quart of pudding, serving four to six.
The Story of Crisco appeared in 1913, two years after Procter & Gamble launched the product, and its several hundred recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's purpose was to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the kitchen, which is why Crisco turns up in places it has no particular business being, including a delicate baked custard like this one. The dish itself is older than the book: a caramel-coated mold set in a water bath is the standard nineteenth-century treatment for what English cookery called a caramel custard and the French crème renversée, and folding cooked rice into the custard was a thrifty way to stretch eggs and milk into a family-sized pudding. Sultanas, the pale seedless raisins of Smyrna, are often said to have been a favoured dried fruit for puddings of this kind in the period.