Rice Pudding: or, You can probably leave the oven off for this one

Today, we are making rice pudding!

Rice Pudding 3 cups milk 1 tablespoon corn starch 2 eggs, separated 1 pinch salt ⅓ cup sugar 1 cup cooked rice 1 teaspoon vanilla ¼ cup sugar (for meringue) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a medium-sized baking dish. Place it in a larger, empty pan. Have the egg yolks ready in a medium bowl, set aside. Cook milk and cornstarch ten minutes in double boiler, or over low heat if you're really good at preventing anything from sticking to the bottom of the pot. (You may want to mix the cornstarch with a little bit of the milk before putting it all in the pot-- it prevents having to chase lumps with a spoon.) After the time is up, start whisking the egg yolks, then slowly pour in about half the milk, beating very hard the whole time. Return to the pot. Add the salt, sugar, rice, and vanilla. Pour into the baking dish. Set on the oven rack and pour boiling water into the bigger pan around it. Bake in hot water until thickened (mine took 45 minutes). When it's ready, beat the egg whites until frothy. Gradually add the sugar, beating as you go. Continue beating until stiff peaks form. Carefully spread onto the pudding (no need to let the pudding cool first). Bake until golden on top, about 15 minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature, then refrigerate. I thought this was better the second day (even if the meringue didn't look nearly as nice). Undated newspaper clipping, Chicago area (probably 1930s-1940s), credited to "Mrs. B. E. B."

I don't usually get particularly excited about rice pudding, but the circumstances were right to make one. I had already turned on the oven after I was asked to make blueberry muffins yet again (I've almost memorized the recipe in time for Halloween), and we had leftover rice slowly drying out in the rice cooker. I may or may not have deliberately cooked too much rice just for this recipe.

Also, we have a recipe for rice pudding in my great-grandmother's notebook that's been staring at me for a while. The last sentence of the recipe is "This is excellent." 

It looks like the newspaper had a section where readers could send in recipes, because there are a few others pasted on the same page with various women's initials under it.

We are directed to start with milk and cornstarch. At this early stage, our recipe could become either pudding or gravy. I know we're supposed to use a double boiler, but I don't have one and didn't feel like holding a bowl over a pot of water.

Recipes like this have changed my mind about nonstick pots. I used to hate how people (usually my mom) were always like "Don't use a metal spoon in that! It's nonstick!" Now that I can choose my own pots, I only get ones that let me plunge an electric mixer in there as needed. But I must admit that nonstick is great for things that want to cling to the metal and then burn. In my usual pot, I would have been doing a constant fight with a rubber spatula. But with this one, I only had to gently but firmly stroke the bottom with a flat-ended wooden spoon.

Our allotment of rice looked surprisingly small compared to everything else. I double-checked the measurements to make sure I'd added enough, and apparently it's supposed to look like this. Maybe the rice expands as it bakes?

After stirring it all together, can you tell any rice is in there?

We made an egg-tempering detour even though the directions don't mention it. I initially thought the other ingredients would cool off the milk and prevent making accidental egg-drop soup, but it was still steaming-hot. 

I would be annoyed that this didn't get mentioned, but you see a lot of omitted steps like this in older newspaper recipes. Column-inches were a precious resource, so they rarely wasted a single line on anything obvious unless they were publishing a cooking lesson.

The mixture already tasted good when I got it into the pan. Maybe it's because I happened to splurge on jasmine rice instead of the cheap stuff. The rice's flavor had started to seep into the hot milk as I was getting the other ingredients in.

This took a surprisingly long time to bake, making me think it would never set. I'm pretty sure we could have just done the whole thing on the stove to save heat and time. Maybe slowly baking it gives the rice more time to absorb the custard? Or maybe this recipe was printed in the winter, when people don't mind running the oven for multiple hours. (And keep in mind this was printed in Chicago. If it was cold, it was freezing.)

As the pudding refused to firm up in the oven, ire set in. How could such a simple recipe fail to work? And this was in someone's personal notes. Even if I didn't know whose binder this was, this recipe clearly worked for someone. So when the pudding threatened to fail on me, I scanned the same six lines of instructions over and over, getting more annoyed every time I didn't see a crucial step that I missed.

After all my fretting, the pudding eventually firmed up. It didn't turn into a sliceable custard, but I figured that if I left it any longer the eggs would scramble. At this point, the directions tell us to "cover with a meringue made from the egg whites" with no further measurements or directions. (See what I mean about skipping over a lot of implied steps?) 

I flipped through the book, found a pie with a meringue on top, and borrowed the instructions from that. When it was ready, I tried to carefully spoon it on top of the pudding in little mounds and then gently smear them together, but it didn't go very well.

The pudding looked really nice when it was freshly baked. I only say this because it didn't look that good a few hours. So before we get to how it looked when I actually served it, let's pause for a good while and see it looking right.

And now, let's see how it looked after it got cold.

The soggy white mess on the pudding looks like an ill-advised attempt to economize but still put something white and fluffy on top of dessert. Today, we live in a beautiful era where you can get whipped cream in a spray can, but back then meringues were the cheap way to top your desserts. After all, if you already cracked the eggs for the custard, why not divert the whites and put them on top? (Well, aside from how this looks really bad.)

I get the impression that it was considered improper to serve a bare pudding back then. The meringue is pointless otherwise. You could barely taste it, and it certainly didn't help with looks. I guess having a dessert with a topping made it seem special, but I would rather not have bothered. (Though to be fair, the top of the bare pudding wasn't very pretty either.)

This was underwhelming right after it got cold. But after it had an extra night to improve in the refrigerator, it was (to quote the last word of the recipe) excellent. It really benefited from an extra night to mellow. 

I like that the pudding doesn't have any butter in it. Not that I'm going on a hunt for runaway calories, but omitting the added fat kept the pudding from being too heavy. It didn't leave you in a post-dessert stupor. It also meant you could have "just a little more" without feeling it. I think the best desserts inhibit portion control.

With that said, I would rather do the whole recipe on the stovetop. It's an excellent pudding, but it's a waste of oven heat unless you really want a baked custard. You can't even push the pudding to the side of the oven while you're baking something else. Because it's in a larger pan of water, you don't have enough rack space. Nevertheless, I definitely have plans to make this again.