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A Rum Rice Pudding
Boil a cup of rice till tender, then have half a dozen lumps or so of loaf sugar dissolved in a tablespoonful of rum and the juice of a small lemon. Stir this all through the rice and put into a mold. Use mold when serving, cold, of course, and surround it with a generous border of whipped cream. Flavor as you please.
A cold molded rice pudding in the older sense: no eggs, no baking, just sweetened rice set in a mold and turned out under whipped cream. The original leaves several things unstated, so the notes below fill the gaps.
- Cook the rice in milkThe recipe says only "boil a cup of rice till tender" and names no liquid. Milk is the usual medium for a molded rice pudding and gives a richer result that holds its shape better: simmer 1 cup short-grain or pudding rice in about 4 cups whole milk until the grains are soft and the mixture is thick and sticky, roughly 30-40 minutes over low heat with frequent stirring. Rice boiled in water will mold, but it will be blander and looser.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken into lumps; six lumps is about 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar. It will not truly dissolve in one tablespoon of rum and a little lemon juice, so warm the three together until the sugar melts, then stir the syrup through the hot rice.
- The rum is a flavoring, not a soakOne tablespoon in a full cup of rice reads as faint by modern standards. Dark rum carries better than light; two tablespoons is defensible without turning it into a boozy dish.
- Getting it to unmoldThe hinge of the dish. The rice must be starchy and still warm when packed, pressed firmly into a rinsed (not greased) mold, and chilled at least 4 hours. Dip the mold briefly in hot water and invert onto a cold plate.
- "Use mold when serving"An awkward line that means turn it out of the mold at the table, not serve it in the mold. A plain charlotte mold, a pudding basin or a loaf pan all work.
- "Flavor as you please"Period flavorings for a dish of this kind included vanilla, grated nutmeg, lemon zest or orange-flower water. Add it to the milk as the rice cooks rather than at the end.
- Whipped creamAbout 1 cup heavy cream, lightly sweetened, whipped to soft peaks and spooned around the base. Whip it shortly before serving; it slumps within an hour or two.
- YieldServes six to eight as written.
Molded rice puddings belong to a dessert repertoire that borrowed its shapes from French cookery — the same impulse that produced charlotte russe and the endless jellied creams of the period. Rice was cheap, milk was plentiful, and a mold turned both into something that could be carried to the table whole and looked considerably grander than its cost. The rum here is doing the work that a vanilla bean or a costly liqueur might in a wealthier kitchen: a tablespoon was affordable, kept indefinitely, and gave a plain nursery pudding a claim to adult company. Loaf sugar, specified rather than granulated, points to the same instinct for the refined version of an everyday thing — it was the whiter, purer, more expensive sugar, sold in cones and broken up at home with sugar nippers.