Rice Pudding (Early Modern -- with Flour)

I was craving dessert last night but I didn't want more tiramisu and we didn't have anything else easily to hand. At first I was thinking of making some sort of hot chocolate but, as usual, I wandered off on a bit of a tangent. I went from hot chocolate to possets to pudding and eventually settled on rice pudding as an appropriate midnight snack.

I found that Cooking in the Archives had done a couple of rice pudding recipes. One that pretty closely resembles a lot of the modern European rice puddings that I've seen: rice, cream, sugar, cinnamon, egg... The only major differences were that the early modern recipe contained no vanilla (which I would normally expect to see in a modern rice pudding) and did contain a few ingredients that would now be considered unusual, exotic, or down-right weird: breadcrumbs, rosewater, bone marrow, and ambergris.

That recipe sounded pretty interesting -- and I probably will give it a try at some point (minus the ambergris) -- but for now I focused my attention on the other rice pudding recipe. It looked very different from any modern rice pudding recipes I've seen (European or otherwise). Mostly because it called for rice flour rather than whole rice grains. It also called for a lot more eggs and butter than I'm used to.

In the end it came out almost like a flan (minus the caramel, of course). It was wobbly and custardy. Fairly bland, lightly sweet, and went very well with a quick mixed berry compote.

Rice (Flour) Pudding

From Cooking in the Archives

Original Recipe

To Make a Rice Pudding

Take six ounces of rice flower a quart of milk set them over y^e fire & stir them well together while they are thick, then put in half pound of Butter six eggs one nutmeg sweeten to y^r tast, Butter y^r Dish that you bake it in /

Modern Recipe

(Halved from original)

Ingredients

• 85g rice flour
• 2 c. whole (3.25%) milk
• 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
• 3 eggs, beaten

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F) and grease a 23cm (9") pie plate or similar baking dish. (one that won't leak!)
2. Combine the rice flour and milk and cook, stirring constantly, over medium-low heat. I chose to add my sugar at this point as well rather than waiting for the mixture to thicken. Either way is fine.
3. It will seem like nothing's happening for a while and then the mixture should thicken quite suddenly all at once. Remove from heat.
4. Mix in the butter. I chose to do this 1 Tbsp. at a time.
5. Mix in the nutmeg.
6. Mix in the eggs. (I mixed them in one at a time.)
7. Pour the mixture into the prepred pie plate and bake for 40 minutes. It will still seem very jiggly and wobbly, but it should be nicely browned on top.
8. Allow to cool (I definite did not follow this instruction), slice, and serve with your choice of toppings: fresh fruit, jam, compote, whipped cream, etc.