Rice Pudding
Rice pudding in its simplest form is delicious, but is too often spoiled by the addition of eggs and raisins. Properly made it should contain only rice, milk, salt, sugar and nutmeg in the proportion of one-quarter of a cupful of rice to two quarts of milk, the remaining ingredients being added to suit individual taste. It should be baked in a slow oven for fully two hours and as often as a yellow crust forms over the top it should be stirred under. So made and served icy cold, it is delectable. 4
A minimalist baked rice pudding that relies entirely on long, slow cooking rather than eggs for its body. The proportions look absurdly thin on paper and are meant to.
- The hinge: stir the skin underEvery time a yellow crust forms, stir it back into the milk. That is what gives the finished pudding its colour and flavour, and it keeps a crust from sealing the top. Repeat as often as a skin forms, as the recipe directs; leave the last one intact if you want a browned top.
- A slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven is conventionally somewhere around 275-300F. The milk should not be allowed to simmer; at a bare tremble the starch releases slowly and thickens the whole dish.
- The ratio is correctA quarter cup of rice to two quarts of milk is 1:32 by volume and will look like rice floating in a lake for the first hour. Whole milk gives the best result; lower-fat milk yields a much thinner pudding and is more prone to curdling at the edges.
- Rice to useShort or medium grain white rice, unrinsed, so the surface starch stays put. Long grain works but gives a looser, less creamy result; converted or parboiled rice releases much less starch and thickens the milk poorly.
- Unspecified quantitiesThe original leaves sugar, salt and nutmeg entirely to taste. For two quarts of milk, half a cup of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt and a whole nutmeg's worth of grating is a reasonable starting point.
- Timing"Fully two hours" is the recipe's minimum; in a modern oven it may well take longer before the milk has reduced and thickened. It should still look slightly loose when you take it out; it sets considerably on cooling.
- VesselA wide, shallow earthenware or glass dish of three quarts or more. Do not cover it.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts of milk gives roughly eight servings. The instruction to serve it icy cold is not incidental: chilled overnight the pudding firms to a spoonable consistency.
Baked rice pudding of this kind -- rice, milk and a slow oven, nothing more -- is associated with English and American farmhouse cookery, and suited a range whose falling heat could be used after other baking was done. The author's irritation at eggs and raisins reflects a real division in period cookery: an egg-thickened rice custard is a different dish, faster and richer. Rice had become a common pantry staple in America by the late nineteenth century, cheap enough that a quarter cup could be stretched across two quarts of milk. Nutmeg was a long-standing finish for milk-based dishes.