Dinner at 1800: Rice Pudding

I know. Rice pudding? Really? Yes, really! And I didn’t let Daniel know what I was making because I wanted to see his face when I placed it in front of him. But, without further ado, let’s get down to it – because this was a fun one to figure out. Oh, and don’t forget to watch the 45-second version over on Instagram!

Rice Pudding

The Virginia Housewife

Published in 1824

This started out with me already questioning what on earth to do. Because the recipe told me to boil half a pound of rice in milk. How much milk? And for how long? Till it was gone? Did I want any left for creaminess? In the end, I decided to measure it the same way I would if it was water and let it boil until it was gone and the rice was tender. Except, apparently milk boils away far faster than water because when I checked it a short time later, it was already burning at the bottom and the grains were only mostly tender. But I decided to make the best of it and move on.

The next instructions were to mash the grains with a wooden spoon. That lasted all of five seconds before I moved to a potato masher. It didn’t get super smooth – at least not as smooth as I envisioned when they talk about mashing the grains – but eventually I declared it done because my arm got tired. I know. Pitiful.

From there, I added sugar, butter, nutmeg, eggs, lemon peel, and a gill of wine – and if you are wondering what a gill of wine is, you should go sign up for my newsletter and get my free vintage measurement conversion chart (inspired by this Dinner at 1800 series, shockingly).

This is when it got sketchy again. Because the next sentence was: “put a paste in the dish and bake it.” I stared at that for a long time. A paste? What kind of paste? What on earth was a paste? It couldn’t be a pie crust because she had used the term pie crust in different recipes. And how much of whatever this paste was? What size dish? Put it in the bottom of the dish, or cover the rice pudding with it? I finally resorted to googling, and found ONE PLACE that mentioned a puff pastry. At which point I realized that at the beginning of the pudding section, Mary Randolph had a recipe for puff pastry. Which she actually calls puff paste.

So, I did one more thing I never really thought I’d bother to do. I made a homemade puff pastry. The instructions were quite helpful. I was to mix flour and water until it made a stiff paste. Good thing I have baked enough to have a general instinct for what a stiff paste might be. Then I was to wash the salt from a pound of butter. I would like you all to know that I spent a good amount of time researching washing salt from butter. And came up with absolutely nothing except instructions to boil butter to remove the salt. Which seems the opposite of washing. But maybe that was just an old term? I am going to take the time to figure this out sometime soon. But it also didn’t help that Google’s era-specific search wasn’t working. Anyway. I ended up just using unsalted butter (for the record, I think it needed the salt).

Then, a quarter pound of butter at a time, I folded it in and rolled out the dough. And, I was skeptical, but by the time I finished, I had an absolutely LOVELY dough. I was actually quite proud of myself.

Whew. Okay. Back to the rice pudding. I randomly selected a dish that I thought might be big enough, and decided it made the most sense to put the rice pudding into a dish lined with “paste” rather than putting the paste over the rice pudding mixture. Of course, there was absolutely no indication of at what temperature to bake it or for how long, so I went with a moderate oven at 350 and baked it until the crust was golden and my cake tester came out clean.

I then did something I haven’t done before. I tried it before serving it to Daniel. I was immensely skeptical. But…it was really good. And it was totally worth not telling Daniel what it was to see his face when I unveiled it. Because, though we have both had and enjoyed rice pudding before, who would ever guess it would be served in a puff pastry?? But he, as skeptical as I when he saw it, was also impressed with the taste, and we fully enjoyed have rice pudding for dessert the next few days. PLUS, now I know how to make puff pastry.