Rice pudding

"What is the matter with Mary Jane? She's crying with all her might and main, And she won't eat her dinner - rice pudding again - What is the matter with Mary Jane?"

A.A Milne

Yes I know it's very corny to start with the above quote - it's almost the only 'famous' quote there is about rice pudding, though I hope to find a few more from my cookbooks and online articles. For we are having rice pudding for dinner tonight. We haven't had it for ages and ages. It's David's special meal night and he has asked for a barbecued meal. And no I am not going to barbecue rice pudding though I wonder if there is a version of barbecued rice pudding out there?

Yes there is - I just found one - Smokey Rice Pudding with Pomegranate Molasses. It's by Ben Tish who I think is another trendy London chef. It's not quite barbecued - more of a weber recipe than straight barbecue, but it just goes to show how versatile basic rice pudding can be. And, incidentally, how fashionable it is.

But tonight we are going to have just basic rice pudding as taught and fed to me by my mum, who probably got it from her mum. Well because it's a special meal I thought I should do a dessert, and this was the easiest one I could think of.

Rice pudding splits into two camps in my memory. The stuff we had for school dinners - particularly in my primary school days, which was completely revolting and which I had to force down without throwing up. It looked rather like the dish on the right - which is described as sumptuously creamy - but I don't think anything would get me to eat it. Too many awful memories. Lumpy and just too milky.

On the other hand there was my mother's rice pudding which I adored and which looked more like this. And the best bit was the skin on the top. We used to scrape the bits that had stuck to the side off and eat them. They were the special treat and were fought over a bit. There was no skin on the one I got at school. When I made that famous cookbook for my sons as they left home, I included the family recipe for rice pudding because they loved it too. I used to make it a lot. Here is how I wrote it:

"Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Cover the base of a deep pie dish with rice - ordinary calrose rice is the best for this - not the long-grain rice. Cover this thinly with sugar (or vanilla sugar for an extra bit of flavour). Pour over milk until the dish is almost filled - don’t go too close to the top or it will boil over and make a mess in your oven. Sprinkle lightly with ground mixed spices. The easiest way to do this is to put the spices on a teaspoon, hold it over the dish, and tap the spoon handle as you move it above and across the surface. If you don’t have any mixed spices use cinnamon and nutmeg (not too much nutmeg). Place in the oven and cook for 2-3 hours. The texture should be creamy, and the rice should be cooked."

It must be about the easiest pudding to make that there is. It takes two minutes to assemble. Yes it takes a couple of hours to cook but you don't do anything to it whilst it's cooking. The trick is not to overcook it so that it loses its creaminess.

So I looked online and in my cookbooks to find out how my method compared with others. Felicity Cloake as usual does a pretty good job of summarising it all although not completely - well her version didn't have the spices on top. Indeed she doesn't even mention this as an alternative.

I researched some more and it seemed to me that there were two basic methods and then variations on each one, plus some that sort of combined the two.

The first method is to cook it in a saucepan on top of the stove, with various additions - alcohol of various kinds, sultanas, vanilla, spices, lemon - that kind of thing. The most tantalising version I found was one of the oldest - from Eliza Acton and called Cheap Rice Pudding. She has other versions but this is the one I have. It's sort of weird but very simple, though maybe it's what put Mary Jane off rice pudding:

"Wash six ounces of rice, mix it with three-quarters of a pound of raisins, tie them in a well-floured cloth, giving them plenty of room to swell; boil them exactly an hour and three-quarters, and serve the pudding with very sweet sauce: this is a nice dish for the nursery. A pound of apples pared, cored, and quartered, will also make a very wholesome pudding, mixed with the rice, and boiled from an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half; and sultana raisins and rice will give another good variety of this simple pudding.

Rice 60z; raisins, 3/4 lb; 1 3/4 hour. Or rice, 6 oz; apples, 1 lb; 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hour."

Take note - no milk, which, as Felicity Cloake points out, is really the main ingredient in a rice pudding, so adding a bit of cream will give extra richness. Eliza Acton's is very plain and probably ends up more like a pudding. After all it's really just rice boiled with raisins in a clump. No not for me. And I couldn't find a picture - but then this one has probably been consigned to history.

Jamie Oliver (or rather his wife) has a recipe for a boiled rice pudding which looks a bit better, though it is covered in fruit so it's a bit hard to tell really. Underneath it probably looks like that gluggy one further up the page.

The second basic method is the baking one - which is what I do. Variations being whether you add things to the rice - sultanas being the most common (Jane Grigson finds this 'distasteful') - and whether you put spices on the top. I was actually very surprised to see that not many recipes had the spices sprinkled on the top. Which to me is extremely foolhardy because that's where most of the taste is. Even though they may have raved on about the skin on top they get it from the milk and butter, not from mixed spices or nutmeg.

donna hay 1

donna hay 2

Above are two Donna Hay versions, both of which have the fabled skin and although it looks like it comes from spices, actually it doesn't. I think the one on the right just has something - maybe cocoa - sprinkled on top of it once cooked.

Delia has a pretty simple version which is close to my own - though, again, no spices, and she also adds some evaporated milk to make it richer. Well I might put in the dregs of my last carton of cream just to enrich it a bit.

Then there are the hybrids - the ones that start with boiling and then transfer to the oven. Or that add stewed fruit - rhubarb is a favourite - at the end, or dob jam on top. David likes jam with his I think, but I've never been a fan. I do vaguely remember having rhubarb with it on occasion though.

And finally there are those that add eggs or egg yolks - lots of them in some cases either boiled or baked. But, as Felicity Cloake says:

"Overwhelmingly rich and heavy with vanilla – more like a rice custard than a pudding – I suspect it's designed to be served in teeny tiny Michelin-starred portions, rather than in a big bowl around the kitchen table on a Sunday evening"

And speaking of Michelin starred portions, here in Australia we have an incredibly complicated dish called Risogalo from George Calombaris

risogalo 1

risogalo 2

risogalo 3

It's served in a jar with other things, including rose-water pastry and is incredibly complicated. I have a 'simplified' version in one of those compilation cookbooks, which nevertheless has a huge long list of ingredients and looks very complicated to make. The last picture above, is, I think, just the rice pudding - which is the boiled version with various flavourings but no eggs.

There are, of course, masses of different versions from around the world but I think that's a whole different topic. Here I'm just talking about ordinary old British rice pudding. But that world thing has probably led to people using other kinds of rice to the ordinary cheap old pudding rice - short grain - but not fancy arborio etc. When I was young this was the only kind of rice you could get. Not right to use basmati or brown, or arborio or jasmine.

"I found numerous recipes calling for other sorts, many prefaced with the excuse that the writer didn't keep any of the right stuff in the house (just imagine publishing a recipe for a risotto made with jasmine rice, or a pilau with arborio – stand up for our great national puddings, people!)." Felicity Cloake

And she tested out those other rices too and found them very unsatisfactory.

Historically I should say that it dates back to medieval times when it was a dish for kings and queens because the rice was so expensive. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that it became common for all. And vanilla would not have been used before we had access to vanilla.

I'll leave the last word to Jane Grigson, who grew up hating it and came to rice pudding rather late in life:

"a rice pudding must be flavoured with a vanilla pod or cinnamon stick. It must be cooked long and slowly, it must be eaten with plenty of double cream. Like so many other English dishes, it has been wrecked by meanness and lack of thought."

I've never had it with double cream - but I will add some to the milk.