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Rice-Milk
(Sweden.) Wash 4 ounces rice, add 1 pint milk and a pinch of salt. Put it in a double boiler, let it boil until it is a perfect cream, stirring often. When tender, pour into a bowl and serve with sugar, very cold.
A plain Swedish rice porridge, and the whole thing hinges on the ratio and the patience. Two details in the original need translating: the weight of rice and the assumption of a double boiler.
- Measures4 ounces of rice is a scant 2/3 cup by volume. A pint here is 2 cups, or 2 1/2 if the book is working in imperial pints. Either way it is a tight ratio for a porridge, and you will likely need to add more hot milk as it cooks — Swedish risgrynsgröt is generally cooked with a good deal more liquid to the rice than this.
- The riceUse a short or medium grain rice — pudding rice, arborio, or a Scandinavian grötris. Long-grain will stay separate and never reach the "perfect cream" the recipe asks for.
- Double boilerThe point is to prevent the milk scorching on the bottom, which it does readily. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir attentively; expect roughly an hour or more in a double boiler, and appreciably less over direct heat.
- Washing the riceOld cookbooks wash rice to remove grit and talc from milling. Modern rice does not need it, and rinsing removes surface starch you actually want here for the creaminess. Skip it.
- "A perfect cream"The grains should be fully collapsed and the whole mass thick enough to mound on a spoon. Undercooked rice in milk stays chalky at the centre; taste a grain rather than trusting the clock.
- Served very coldIt will set firm in the refrigerator as the starch retrogrades. Stir in a splash of cold milk before serving to loosen it back to a spoonable consistency.
- Yield and servingServes three or four as a dessert. Sugar at table is the instruction, but cinnamon sugar is the Swedish habit, and cold porridge takes well to a spoonful of lingonberry or tart stewed fruit.
Rice boiled slowly in milk is a long-established sweet dish in northern Europe, and in Sweden it belongs above all to Christmas: risgrynsgröt is eaten on Christmas Eve, traditionally with a single blanched almond hidden in the pot, the finder said to be next to marry. Rice itself was an expensive import into Scandinavia for centuries, which is why a bowl of it cooked in milk read as a festive dish rather than an everyday one — grain porridges of barley and oats were the daily fare. This book collects dishes by country for an English-speaking cook, and the terse "(Sweden.)" is doing a lot of work: what arrives here as a nursery pudding served cold with sugar is, at home, closer to a holiday institution.