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Easter Pudding
(England.) Mix slowly 1/2 pint milk and 4 ounces rice four, add 1 pint boiling milk and stir on fire for five minutes. Add 2 ounces butter, 2 ounces sugar, and boil for ten minutes more. When cool, add, stirring it, 1 gill of cold milk, and the grated rind of a lemon, 6 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, 2 ounces sugar, and 1 ounce currants. Beat well, pour into a dish, bake until brown, and serve cold, with cream.
A baked rice-flour custard, essentially a soufflé-lightened blancmange. The verbatim text says "rice four" — read rice flour, which is what the thickening and the quantities call for.
- Temperature and timeNo oven setting is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent; bake until set and browned on top, probably somewhere near 40 to 50 minutes, in a buttered dish of at least 2 quarts (allow headroom for the beaten whites). It is done when a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean; the centre should still wobble slightly, as it firms while cooling.
- The hinge: fold, do not beatThe text says to "beat well" after the separately whipped whites go in. In modern practice, fold them through the cooled rice base instead, or the pudding loses the lift that distinguishes it from a plain rice mould.
- Cool the base first"When cool" is doing real work. Add the eggs to a hot rice paste and they scramble into threads. Let the thickened mixture drop to lukewarm, then stir in the cold milk, which speeds this along and slackens the paste enough to receive the eggs.
- Pints and gillsA gill is a quarter-pint: half a US cup, or 5 fl oz if the measures are imperial. "Pint" is likewise ambiguous between 16 and 20 fluid ounces. Either works — start with 16 oz for the boiling milk and add more only if the paste stiffens past the consistency of thick porridge.
- Weights to volume4 oz rice flour is about 3/4 cup; 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons; 2 oz sugar is a scant 1/3 cup, used twice; 1 oz currants is about 3 tablespoons.
- Lemon rindGrate only the coloured zest of an unwaxed lemon. Period cooks often rubbed a sugar lump over the fruit instead, which extracts the oil without any bitter pith.
- Stirring the baseRice flour catches badly. Use a heavy pan and a flat-ended wooden spoon or silicone spatula, and keep the heat low through the ten-minute boil — the mixture should barely blip.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Served cold with pouring cream, as directed; it deflates as it cools, which is expected.
Easter puddings of this kind belong to a long English line of baked milk-and-grain puddings eaten at the close of Lent, when eggs, butter and cream returned to the table after weeks of abstinence — six eggs and two kinds of dairy in one dish is the point of the recipe as much as its flavour. Rice flour gave a smoother set than whole rice and is often said to have suited invalid and nursery cookery, which may be why it turns up so often in Victorian and Edwardian pudding chapters. The book itself is a collection of dishes gathered country by country, and the parenthetical "(England.)" is the author's way of tagging provenance; the currants and lemon rind are the standard English pudding seasoning of the period, used here in restrained quantity rather than the heavy fruiting of a Christmas pudding.