Ground Rice Pudding

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Ground Rice Pudding

by LissaT ^Pro @ Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 – 08:08:51 pm

In another blog I have just read the words "You British are so good at desserts".

On the whole I am not a pudding eater, and weekday dinners tend to be a single course followed by fruit, a biscuit or cheese. But on Sunday I nearly always cook a pudding - a proper traditional English pudding. Today's was ground rice. Now I have heard this excellent pud compared in both taste and texture to wallpaper paste, but I love milk puddings and so does the rest of the family. Even Jacob, the milk hater, likes milk puddings. Our top favourite is rice pudding (which would have taken too long today), but almost anything where a grain or pasta is cooked slowly in sweetened milk and flavoured with nutmeg will do - tapioca, semolina, barley, macaroni . . . or come to that baked egg custard, Birds custard, blancmange: you name it, we'll eat it.

My other favourites include bread and butter pudding, Queen of Puddings, African Queen (Queen of Puddings without the lemon and jam, but with a good flavouring of cocoa powder), treacle sponge, ginger sponge, treacle tart and Christmas Pudding. Some of the boys have a great liking for jam or marmalade roly-poly, but with all that suet there have to be limits on sin.

Yesterday I was making the Simnel Cake when Jess turned up. Jess doesn't care for marzipan (strange child) and insisted on her right to make a chocolate sponge to take home with her (using up the last of my butter and all of the cream). After recent school cookery - chilli con carne which nobody except Joe likes and apple crumble which is hardly a challenge and not particularly popular - she was very pleased to have made something everyone was queuing up to sample. She took it home uncut, and father and I have given up hope of a piece or two making their way back here.
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11 Comments on Ground Rice Pudding

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- birdsong ^Pro
- Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 @ 08:46:25 pm
We love puddings here - sadly to the detriment of my children eating 'firsts' properly.

I did a rice pudding in a pan during the week for the first time. Not at all bad, but I know it hardly counts. Jam roly-poly has to be the best.

Families these days eat custard from Tetrapaks. And then they wonder why kids go missing...
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 @ 10:43:54 pm
  I have never understood how my nephews and niece got into the habit of assuming that there would always be a pudding. Their grandmother does pudding as a matter of course (although these are increasingly shop cakes rather than proper puds) but both at home and here puddings tend to be occasional treats - as I said, I cook puddings on Sunday.
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- angievoluti
- Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 @ 09:12:04 pm
Oh, I do tiramisu quite well. The Italians do not put any alcohol in it and insist on using proper sponge fingers (savoiardi) instead of the Tesco variety. It makes a lot of difference. And I looooooove rice pudding. Any variation to the recipe would be gratefully accepted. The Italians use panettone!!!!
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 @ 10:39:11 pm
  Swaps on recipes - my niece is devoted to tiramisu - and I would like an alcohol free version.
  
  I do the simplest of rice puddings:- to each pint of full cream milk, two ounces of pudding rice and one ounce of caster sugar. Heat the milk and pour it on to the rice which is already in a buttered dish, stir in the sugar, sprinkle with nutmeg and possibly a few little knobs of butter. Cook for hours in a low oven until the milk is absorbed and the top is golden brown.
  
  I sometimes use panetone in bread and butter pudding, but mostly I use plain bread and butter sprinkled with sultanas (or whatever dried fruit happens to be open) with a mix of a pint of warm milk, 3 or 4 eggs, an ounce of sugar and some nutmeg poured over it. I leave it to soak and then sprinkle some demarara sugar and more nutmeg on top and cook it in a medium oven for about half an hour.
  - - angie
    - http://angie-voluti.blog.co.uk
    - Sunday, Mar. 23, 2008 @ 12:06:13 pm
    Lissa, HAPPY EASTER! I am sorry it's taken me so long to reply - have been rather swamped with chores and other things.. I, too, wanted to go to church but we got up late and I had some lamb shanks to brown and children to wash so we never managed it. Besides, my stepdaughter's plans to come changed and required my husband to go and get her rather than wait for her to come by train; that put a spanner in the works too. Ah, the joys of expended families!
    Anyway, the problem I have with receipes is that I don't follow them strictly. With tiramisu, the secret is to use the right ingredients: savoiardi rather than tesco sponge fingers, organic mascarpone cheese and eggs, and proper italian strong coffee. For six, I would use two boxes of savoiardi and six eggs, two tubs of mascarpone cheese, a cup of caster sugar and a large twelve-person caffettiera.
    Mix egg yolks with sugar until it becomes a triumph of ribbons, all fluffy and smooth and stretching from your fork into the bowl; add the mascarpone cheese and marry it well to the rest. Mount the egg white to firm peaks of snow. Incorporate the snow until the final mixture looks a little bubbly (the air helps with the creaminess). The coffee must be storng but not close to poisoning levels. No need for sugar in it, and avoid any alcohol (you want the taste to shine through, not to be drowned by the alcohol).
    Dip each savoiardo into the coffee - better to put the coffee into a flat plate and dip the biscuits. Make layers as you usually do. Spread the cream on top of each layers, and two layers should be enough. For extra naughtiness sprinkle the cocoa on each layer. If you feel virtuous just do the top, it looks pretty. If the coffee is still hot do not use the cocoa powder until the tiramisu is well cooled or it will just disappear into the cream and the cream itself will get too liquid. A residence in your fridge for three hours should do the final trick. Enjoy.
    Remember that the coffee should drench each biscuit: tiramisu is not for people who are sensible or restrained with their food! I hope this helps. Your receipe certainly did.
    - - LissaT ^Pro
      - Sunday, Mar. 23, 2008 @ 03:20:51 pm
      Thanks. I'll do this next time I'm feeling sinful.
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- lizdavies
- Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 @ 09:17:13 pm
We're not great pudding eaters here and nor am I a great pudding maker, although I do a mean sherry trifle at Christmas. (The only fault I've found in my daughter-in-law so far is that she didn't like my trifle - too sloppy, she maintained!)
I'm a sucker for anything with dried fruit in it though, especially fat juicy raisins, so we do get through a fair amount of fruit cake, fruit loaf, fruit and nut mix, fruit pastry etc etc. for dessert.
Chocolate is like chips - I only usually eat either in restaurants, not at home.
- - LissaT ^Pro
  - Sunday, Mar. 16, 2008 @ 10:49:51 pm
  Sherry trifle is also a great favourite. (I always feel that it is important to distinguish proper sloppy trifle from those dreadful things made with jelly that are served at children's parties - or were in our childhood.) On the other hand it doesn't really fit in with the nursery puddings of my blog. I know that it is one of the easiest to make (though none could be said to be difficult) but it always feels like party food.
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- mycorneroftheworld
- Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2008 @ 10:39:05 am
That traditional English pudding with rice that you talked about, do you have that as a dessert or as a meal? I am a little confused about the word "pudding", if it means a dessert or if it can be a meal as well?
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- LissaT ^Pro
- Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2008 @ 10:58:31 am
English is full of such pitfalls.

Pudding traditionally is a savoury eaten in poorer households before the meat to fill the eaters up so they didn't want anything much of the more expensive main course.

However, (leaving aside Yorkshire* pudding now usually eaten with rather than before the meat, and steak and kidney pudding which is meat and gravy cooked - boiled or steamed - inside a suet crust and eaten as a main course) in more affluent households pudding came to mean a cooked sweet course, as distinct from dessert which is often used to mean the sweet course, but correctly means the fruit eaten with or after a meal.

The use of the word sweet (as a noun), dessert and pudding are in England as much indicators of class as whether you go to the lavatory or toilet, relax in the drawing room or the lounge, or eat lunch or dinner in the middle of the day - and totally confusing to native speakers of English from other countries, let alone those for whom English is a second language. These distinctions are now rather old-fashioned, but will probably persist until memories of the strictures of the last Victorian grandmama have faded from memory into legend.

Suffice to say that every pudding I have mentioned (except Yorkshire pudding and steak and kidney pudding) is sweet and eaten after the main course.

*There are savoury puddings from other counties which have mostly fallen out of use, though I have a recipe for a particularly delicious Derbyshire Pudding.
- - mycorneroftheworld
  - Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2008 @ 12:20:31 pm
  Thanks for your explanation!
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