[Sca-cooks] rice pudding

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Aug 3, 2005, at 4:07 AM, Volker Bach wrote:

> Am Mittwoch, 3. August 2005 02:27 schrieb Huette von Ahrens:
>
>> Are we talking an actual sweet rice pudding here?  Or are we talking
>> blancmange? Because I am having a hard time imagining an sweet  
>> rice pudding
>> served hot ...
>>
>
> Well, it's not quite the same thing as rice pudding, but here we  
> traditionally
> serve 'milk rice' boiled to a mush with lemon rind and sugar,  
> sprinkled with
> sugar and cinnamon or a fruit compote. Piping hot.
>
> Giano

Richard Thorne, in "Pot On The Fire," (or is it Pot Au Feu; I  
forget), has, IIRC, a chapter devoted to an Italian milk rice which  
is somewhere in between a breakfast porridge and risotto. I don't  
remember it being sweetened, though. But grain dishes cooked in milk  
seem to be pretty old and found almost anywhere milk is consumed, I  
suspect.

Actually, thinking about the differences between the modern American  
rice pudding (which seems to be pretty close or identical to modern  
English rice pudding), it's probably not that different from late  
period versions under the same name: rice with cream, eggs, spices  
and a maybe a little sugar. It can be boiled, or baked with the  
custard-ey ingredients, or even packed into sausage casings. The main  
difference is that it may have gotten softer and sweeter over the years.

Which is interesting, since by contrast, what blancmanger has lost  
over the years is both the chicken/capon component  _and_ the rice.

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04