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Rice Mold, with Maple Sugar
Wash well one cupful of rice, drop into boiling salted water and keep at a galloping boil until the grains are tender all through. This will take from twelve to eighteen minutes, according to the variety of rice. Drain, place in a saucepan with one-half cupful of milk and one-quarter of a cupful of cream and cook very slowly until the liquid is absorbed. Have ready a buttered mold. Fill this with rice, lapping it sharply from time to time that the rice may settle well. Stand in the oven open for seven minutes, then turn out on a heated dish. Serve with an abundance of good butter and scraped maple sugar. This is an old New England dish and a very good one.
A plain boiled-rice pudding served as a sauce course, and it stands or falls on the mold turning out cleanly. A few notes on the vessel, the oven and the sugar.
- Cook the rice like pastaA "galloping boil" in plenty of salted water, drained when tender, is the method here rather than absorption. The recipe allows twelve to eighteen minutes depending on the variety, so test rather than time it; a shorter, starchier grain will cling together better in the mold.
- The milk stageHalf a cup of milk and a quarter cup of cream over very low heat until absorbed; the recipe does not say whether to cover the pan. Stir gently and infrequently, since vigorous stirring at this point breaks the grains and makes the mold pasty rather than sliced.
- "Lapping it sharply"Most likely rapping the filled mold down on a folded towel as you add rice, so it settles with no voids; the phrase is not explained in the text. A one-quart charlotte mold, pudding basin or straight-sided bowl works, and a generous buttering helps it release.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the phrase is "stand in the oven open," which reads as a gentle warming rather than baking. A moderate oven for the stated seven minutes is a reasonable modern guess; the aim is only to set the outside and warm the mold through, and the rice should not brown.
- Scraped maple sugarNineteenth-century maple sugar came as a hard cake that was scraped with a knife into fluffy shavings. Modern granulated maple sugar is the direct substitute; a block of maple candy grated on the coarse side of a box grater is closer to the original texture.
- Butter"An abundance of good butter" most likely means butter served with the mold to melt over it rather than stirred into the rice, though the recipe does not specify. Unsalted works better against the sweet sugar, though the rice itself is salted.
- YieldOne cup of raw rice will give roughly four modest servings; no yield is stated. It is best taken to the table hot, as the mold stiffens as it cools.
Rice puddings of this sort were everyday sweets in nineteenth-century New England, where Carolina rice, shipped north from the South, was cheap, kept well in the barrel, and stretched a small quantity of milk and cream a long way. What marks this one as regional is the maple sugar: before cane sugar became reliably cheap, sugar from the spring sugaring-off was the northern household's own sweetener, sold and stored as hard cakes that were scraped or grated as needed. The recipe appears in the Twentieth Century Cook Book, whose author closes by vouching for it as an old New England dish.