Rice pudding

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Image:Risalamande.jpg Image:ArrozDoce.jpg Rice pudding is a dessert enjoyed by people of different cultures all over the world. It is made by combining rice with a sweetener and other ingredients often including milk. Those who prize rice pudding often regard it as a comfort food. Others find some of the varieties to be unpleasantly bland and glutinous.

1 Types of Rice Pudding
2 History
3 Rice pudding in folklore
4 Rice pudding in literature
5 Recipes, old and new
6 References

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Types of Rice Pudding

Rice puddings are found in nearly every area of the world. Recipes can greatly vary even within a single country. The dessert can be boiled or baked. Different types of pudding vary depending on preparation methods and the ingredients selected. The following ingredients are regularly found in rice puddings.

rice ( long or short grain white rice, brown rice, black rice, basmati, or jasmine rice)

milk (whole milk, coconut milk, cream, evaporated or condensed)

spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger etc.),

flavorings (vanilla, orange, lemon, pistachio, rose water etc.),

sweetener (sugar, brown sugar, honey, fruit or syrups)

eggs

The following is a short list of various rice puddings from different regions.

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East Asia

Kao Niow Dahm (Thai) Black Rice Pudding

Banana Rice Pudding (Cambodian)

Babao Fan (Chinese, 八寶飯) Eight Treasure Rice Pudding

Pulut Hitam (Malaysian) Black glutinous rice pudding

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South Asia

Kheer (Indian) with boiled down cow's milk

Phirni (North Indian) with broken rice, cardamom and pistachio served cold.

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Middle East

Sütlaç(Turkish) with milk and vanilla

Muhallebi(Turkish) with rice flour

Moghlie(Arab) with anise and ginger

Riz bi Haleeb(Arab) with rose water

Shola-e-zard (Persian) with saffron

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Europe

Budino di Riso (Italian) with raisins and orange peel

Risalamande (Danish) with whipped cream and almonds, often served with cherry sauce

Ryzogalo (Ρυζόγαλο-Greek) with milk and cinnamon

Riskrem (Norwegian)

Risgrynsgröt (Swedish)

Mliečna ryža (Slovak)

Arroz Doce (Portuguese) with milk, cinnamon and lemon

Arroz con Leche (Spanish) with cinnamon and lemon

Milchreis (German) with cinnamon

Teurgoule (Normandy)

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Latin America

Arroz con Leche (Latin American) varied preparation

Arroz con dulce (Puerto Rican) with coconut milk

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History

Rice was first cultivated in Southeast Asia. Over thousands of years, various recipes have developed in the Eastern Asia. Some include fruit and honey, while others are far simpler consisting of only rice, water and sugar.

For the west, rice pudding originated in the Middle East or Persia. Firni, one of the oldest of these middle eastern puddings, is made with rice flour and was introduced to India by the Moghuls. Records of an Indian sweet milk pudding occur in the 14th century. Shola, flavored with rose water, was introduced to Perisa by the 13th century Mongols and is now eaten in much of west Asia.

In Europe, rice pudding with goat’s milk was first used by the Romans for medicinal purposes. For this reason, the first written records of rice pudding occur in medical texts. Medieval European sweet boiled rice pudding often was made with almond or cow’s milk. Rice pudding appears in 1542 in the then Danish town of Malmö. However, rice was an imported luxury item reserved for the rich. Baked rice puddings featuring elaborate spices and other ingredients appeared in the 17th century. In the 18th century, Rice pudding began to replace rye porridge and barley porridge at festivities in Scandinavia. Over centuries, the European recipe has been simplified resulting the modern dish often criticized for its blandness.

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Rice pudding in folklore

In Sweden, rice pudding, risgrynsgröt, is traditionally served at Christmas and often goes by the names julgröt (Yule porridge) and tomtegröt (tomte porridge). The latter name is due to the old tradition of sharing the meal with the guardian of the homestead, the tomte (see also blót), a tradition akin to this also exists in Denmark. The pudding is usually eaten with cinnamon and sugar. Sometimes an almond is hidden in the pudding and popular belief has it that he one who eats it will be married the following year. Rice pudding is also a traditional Christmas dessert in Norway and Denmark.

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Rice pudding in literature

A reference to rice pudding is found in the third verse of the seventeenth-century nursery rhyme, "Pop Goes the Weasel:"

    Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
      Half a pound of treacle.
    Mix it up and make it nice,
      Pop goes the weasel.

Rice pudding is mentioned frequently in literature of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, typically in the context of a cheap, plain, familiar food, often served to children or invalids, and often rendered boring by too-frequent inclusion in menus.

In Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Kenelm Chillingly, a would-be host reassures a prospective guest: "Don't fear that you shall have only mutton-chops and a rice-pudding...". In Henry James' A Passionate Pilgrim, the narrator laments: "having dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding."

Charles Dickens relates an incident of shabby treatment in A Schoolboy's Story: "it was imposing on Old Cheeseman to give him nothing but boiled mutton through a whole Vacation, but that was just like the system. When they didn't give him boiled mutton, they gave him rice pudding, pretending it was a treat. And saved the butcher."

In Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians, the children express dissatisfaction with their food. "My father and Esther... are having roast fowl, three vegetables, and four kinds of pudding," Pip says angrily. "It isn't fair!" His sister notes that "we had dinner at one o'clock." "Boiled mutton and carrots and rice pudding!" her brother replies, witheringly.

Rice Pudding is the title and subject of a poem by A. A. Milne, in which the narrator professes puzzlement as to what is the matter with Mary Jane, who is "crying with all her might and main/And she won't eat her dinner—rice pudding again—/What is the matter with Mary Jane?" As the poem proceeds, the reader comes to suspect that Mary Jane's problem is connected with the word "again."

An 1884 New York Times article is entitled Living on a Small Salary: Close Economy Practiced by a Clerk and his Wife. They Live Comfortably in a Brooklyn Flat and Save Nearly $300 Out of a Yearly Income of $1000. "You observe," says the husband, "that although we have but little beyond the bare necessities of life we manage to live comfortably and happily." "Yes, indeed, we are happy," interjects the wife. The reporter describes their evening meal as a plate containing "a nice cut of beef, a couple of boiled potatoes, and a liberal portion of green peas." For dessert, there is rice pudding, which the reporter describes as "truly a delicious compound of rice and egg and sugared frosting."

A 1917 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, on treatment of Turkish prisoners of war in Egypt describes the food with approval. The "ordinary diet" is described as "Breakfast: Arab bread; sweetened fresh milk. Lunch: Arab bread; beef; rice, vegetables. Dinner: Arab bread; rice soup; rice pudding."

Rice pudding is mentioned with much more affection in an incident related by Walt Whitman in Specimen Days. Whitman visited an invalid soldier who "was very sick, with no appetite... he confess'd that he had a hankering for a good home-made rice pudding—thought he could relish it better than anything... I soon procured B. his rice pudding. A Washington lady, (Mrs. O'C.), hearing his wish, made the pudding herself, and I took it up to him the next day. He subsequently told me he lived upon it for three or four days."

In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the supercomputer Deep Thought derives the existence of rice pudding from first principles. This is to counterpoint between the complexity of Deep Thought and its task of exploring the eternal verities, with simplicity of the pudding.

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Recipes, old and new

A recipe for rice pudding is found in the (1615) domestic guide, Gervase Markham, The English Huswife:

Take a half pound of rice and steep it in new milk a whole night and in the morning drain it and let the milk drop away; then take the best, sweetest and thickest creme and put the rice into it and boil it a little; and set it to cool an hour or two and after, put in the yolks of half a dozen eggs, a little pepper, cloves, mace, currants, dates, sugar and salt; and having mixed them well together, put in a great store of beef suet well beaten and small shred and so put it into the frames and boil them as before showed, and serve them after a day old.

The 1881 Household Cyclopedia also has a recipe for plain rice pudding:

One quart of milk
1/2 teacup of rice
2 teaspoons of sugar
1/2 of a nutmeg grated
a small piece of butter, size of hickory-nut.

Pick and wash the rice; add all the ingredients. Stir all well together, and put in a slack oven one and half to two hours. When done pour it in a pudding dish, and serve when cold. If baked in an oven, take off the brown skin before it is poured in the pudding-dish, and replace it on the Sop of the pudding as before.

One typical modern recipe for rice pudding is: