[Sca-cooks] Rice recipes that bear a resemblance to rice custard/pudding

[Sue Clemenger]

This is in response to the old thread wherein someone was looking for
documentation for period rice puddings/custards?
These are not 16th c., but rather come from the Anonymous Andalusian
cookbook that His Grace has on his website.  I ran across them while
doing research for an upcoming feast.  They don't have egg, but bear a
truly remarkable resemblance to the stove-top rice puddings I've made.
--Maire

> Recipe for Honeyed Rice
> Take rice and soak it in fresh water, enough to cover it, for a day or
> overnight. Then wash it and put it on the fire in a pot or kettle
> (tinjir). Cook it with water or fresh milk, then add four or five
> ratls of clean honey from which you have skimmed the foam. Cook it
> carefully on a gentle fire. Moisten it, while cooking, with fresh milk
> until it sticks together, coagulates and becomes a paste. Pour it onto
> a platter and macerate it with a spoon. Make a hole in the center
> which you fill with fresh, melted butter and dust it with ground sugar
> and cinnamon and use it.
>
>
> Preparation of Rice Cooked Over Water [a double boiler method]
> Take rice washed with hot water and put it in the pot and throw to it
> fresh, pure milk fresh from milking; put this pot in a copper kettle
> that has water up to the halfway point or a little more; arrange the
> copper kettle on the fire and the pot with the rice and milk
> well-settled in it so that it doesn't tip and is kept from the fire.
> Leave it to cook without stirring, and when the milk has dried up, add
> more of the same kind of milk so that the rice dissolves and is ready;
> add to it fresh butter and cook the rice with it; when the rice is
> done and dissolved, take off the pot and rub it with a spoon until it
> breaks up; then throw it on the platter and level it, dust it with
> ground sugar, cinnamon and butter and use. With this same recipe one
> cooks itriyya, fidaush and tharî d al-laban [milk tharid].
>
>
> How Rice Is Cooked in the East
> [p. 59, verso] Take rice washed with hot water and put it in a pot and
> with the rice put fat mutton, from the chest, the hind parts and from
> the waist, and the fat and the leg bones. Add water to cover it plus a
> little more and sufficient salt. Put it in the bread oven overnight
> and take it out the next morning. When it is all mushy, turn it onto a
> platter and dust it with cinnamon, spikenard, ginger and ground sugar.
> You can cook this at home with fresh milk and it is better and more
> delicious.
>
>
> Recipe for Rice Dissolved With Sugar
> Wash what you want of the rice and cook it as usual. Then take it to
> the hearthstone and leave it a while and when it is ready and has
> become mushy, mash it with a spoon until it dissolves and not a trace
> of the grain remains. Then feed it ground white Egyptian sugar and
> stir it vigorously. Add sugar bit by bit until its sweetness dominates
> and it becomes like dissolved fanid [taffy, to judge by the recipe
> given for it in this book]. Then turn it onto a platter and make a
> hole in the center that you fill with fresh butter, or with oil of
> fresh sweet almonds. If you cook this with fresh milk instead of
> water, it will be more delicious and better.