The Case For Rice Pudding

Rice pudding ought to be immaculate and profound, like a very deep, very cold swimming-pond in the middle of an unworked field.

Of course if you don’t like rice pudding you don’t have to make this. You ought to make desserts that you like.

Gregoor’s Landscape with cattle

I do, however, want to serve as a rice pudding booster in case you’re on the fence, because there’s an excellent case to be made for it: It can be very good.

I, for example, adore desserts that are sometimes described by others as “too rich” or “too sweet.” That sounds good to me! To the best of my recollection, I have never tasted a dessert and thought, “I won’t be able to finish this, because of the richness.” I have only ever thought, “How wonderful! This dessert is very rich, and very sweet. I’m really going to enjoy eating it.”

I last wrote about this phenomenon in 2017:

I've been really fixated the last couple of days on the way people sound when they say, as they are digging into some particularly voluptuous foodstuff, "It's almost too rich," or, just as often, "It's almost too sweet." I wish that once a person had uttered that sentence, they were not allowed to say anything else until they levitated off of the floor and slowly passed through the ceiling and into heaven. It's always upturned at the end – "It's almost too rich?" because the observation requires outside confirmation in order to be true, and more often than not the speaker's eyes are closed in the saying of it, presumably because they have to rummage through some of the deepest and oldest corners of themselves in order to discover whether they actually believe it...

I have never heard someone say, "It's almost too savory" or "It's almost too cheesy" or "It's almost too herbal" or "It's almost too flaky" or "I like it, but unfortunately I like it so much that I don't like it anymore." Which is strange, I think, because I know perfectly well that it is possible for something to be too much of almost anything. I understand that there is a muchness to anything that can border on too. I know it is possible for something to be too sweet to be enjoyable, and yet I have never believed a single person who has spoken that sentence. 

Having grown spiritually in the last seven years, I’d like to amend that statement now: I do believe that other people can find a dessert too rich or too sweet to finish comfortably, but it’s not an experience I’ve ever had myself. I must take it on faith.

It does mean that from time to time I am happily reacquainted with the power of a more modest, straightforward dessert, of which rice pudding is an excellent example. The kind of desserts that, without the dulled appeal of being “good for you,” are nonetheless understood as being somehow restorative, which might have appeared on the menu of a well-to-do Edwardian convalescent home.

Complain to your milkman

Rice pudding, when it is made well, is very much worth the eating. Indifferent rice pudding is little better than gruel, I will cheerfully concede; it can easily become gloopy, stodgy, and unappealing, and in such cases can be a grim chore to finish. But the good news is that it is not hard to make rice pudding well.

For this reason I do not recommend baking your rice pudding. You can bake it, of course, and there are many very good recipes for baked rice pudding, which requires only a little care at the beginning and then you can walk away and let the oven do the rest. But what you gain in freedom you lose in lightness. Rice pudding made on the stovetop has a touch of the miraculous about it. It is simple, straightforward, and economical; the only sacrifice required is of attention.

The only ingredients you need for rice pudding are whole milk, short-grain rice, sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon. I think a vanilla bean is worth the expense, but it’s not necessary; vanilla bean paste will make a better replacement than vanilla extract, in my opinion. And it’s similarly worth rasping a cinnamon stick over the kind of grater normally reserved for nutmeg, instead of using ground cinnamon at the end, but this is rice pudding, not caviar. Don’t throw your back out buying a nutmeg rasper if you’ve got perfectly good ground cinnamon you’d rather use.

Butter, cream and eggs are not necessary. Rice pudding should strike only two major notes; you might even call it severe. Butter, cream, and eggs are all excellent ingredients and they make for an astonishing number of wonderful desserts. But rice pudding ought to be immaculate and profound, like a very deep, very cold swimming-pond in the middle of an unworked field. The rice should be unimpeachable. The milk should be exquisitely good.

Bring the following to a boil in a large and heavy pot:

3/4 cup of short- or medium-grain rice (Don’t rinse it beforehand; you want the starch)

1-1/2 cups water

1/2 teaspoon salt

Once it starts to boil, cover and reduce it to a simmer for ten to fifteen minutes. I sometimes peek under the lid after five minutes to make sure it’s not boiling too rapidly. My stovetop has a tendency to run hot and things are likelier to over- rather than under-boil unless I keep an eye on them.

Add four cups of milk and 1/2 cup of sugar. This is where you must pull off your trick, and where the rice pudding demands payment: Park yourself over the stove. Turn your oven fan and open a window if it’s a gas stove and you’re worried about the fumes. It’s worth the time. If you’re only feeding yourself, you’ll have dessert for days. Cook uncovered over a medium-to-low heat for the next 30 to 40 minutes, stirring often. You can watch TV or listen to something while you stir, if you like. You don’t have to stir it non-stop, but you should really be stirring every five minutes to begin with, and by the end you should be stirring very often indeed. The thicker it gets, the more you should stir it; if you notice the rice starts catching on the bottom, turn down the heat and stir more frequently.

You should also use a wooden spoon, because it reduces the chances of the milk boiling over. Milk is likelier to boil over than water.

Over the next half-hour the pudding will begin to assert itself. What it loses in evaporation it gains in sweetness, in richness, in substance. It takes on ceremony and character, like a well-preserved wedding dress. Since you will remain in the same position addressing the pot for the duration, you will become intimately familiar with the minute changes taking place within the steam that issues forth from it. Now the vapor is more substantial, now less, now the smell of hot milk (if the phrase “the smell of hot milk” strikes you as a slightly nauseating one, rice pudding might not be for you. I find it enchanting) moves from a white to a golden register, now all at once you smell the sugar and the atmosphere becomes decidedly dessert-like. It is very rewarding. You have your wooden spoon, and you stir; you have your little flame, and you adjust it; this is your little all, and it is sufficient.

Do not cook it any longer than forty minutes, even if the pudding does not seem fully set yet, and you seem only to have produced porridge¹; it will continue to set as it cools. Overcook it and you risk producing a pot of glue. Turn off the heat and add your vanilla. Anywhere from a half-teaspoon to a full teaspoon of vanilla paste. If you have real vanilla bean, so much the better; scrape half of a pod into the pudding and toss the leftover carapace into a jar of sugar. In a few days you will have vanilla sugar.

Turn out the pudding into a few bowls or tupperwares. They’ll cool faster in smaller quantities, and for my money, rice pudding is at its best when it is a little warmer than fridge-cold. You want it colder than room temperature, so that the effect is one of light freshness, but without the full blast of the refrigerator, which makes the pudding dense and blunts some of the warmer aromas.

You can eat it plain, with a little cinnamon grated over it, sometimes with a little bit of whipped cream ontop. The furthest indulgence I will allow is the addition of red stewed fruit or a very good red jam and a tablespoonful of sour cream, preferably homemade.

Simple things are necessarily a little bit fussy, since there is nowhere to hide. This rice pudding is good; it’s not beautiful and it’s not going to replace cheesecake or caramel apple pie and it would never try to. But it’s worth making and it’s worth having. Like a good hash or a very soft square of flannel.

[Images via]

1. And sweet rice porridge is nothing to sneeze at!