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Sweets/Treats Poor Man's Pudding

poor man's pudding.
512px-Custard.jpg
(from the Sunbury American newspaper, Sunbury, Pennsylvania, May 7, 1864)

Ingredients:

3 quarts milk​
1 teacup rice​
butter​
sugar​
vanilla​

Instructions:

3 quarts of milk, 1 teacup of rice; wash the rice, and let it soak in the milk several hours. Flavor with a piece of butter the size of an egg; sugar to the taste, also vanilla, and bake the whole three or four hours, untill the mixture seems creamy. Baking, if properly done, dissolves the rice. - Germantown Telegraph.
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Photo by Interiot~commonswiki, CC-3.0

As we run out of "boughten" cookies and cakes, our household is turning to making our own. This recipe, from the Sunbury American looks like a good one to try.
 
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I'm curious if the rice really will dissolve. I don't much like rice pudding but if the lumps of rice were gone....
Yup, never liked the texture either. Same thing with tapioca. My brother adored it, and my grandmother would make it from scratch for him when we visited. (Blech!) give me chocolate pudding any day instead!
 
While I'm confined indoors I'm going to grind up my old hard tack and make a boiled "plumb duff" with the fine crumbs. I'm actually going to put prunes or "dried plums" in the "plum duff" even though the origins of the term came from "plumb full of dried fruits, etc." Mine'll get some rum soaked dried fruits added before I fill the bag and boil it...

Some Horchata milk-like sweetened drinks use rice in the recipe, and it does apparently dissolve the rice eventually...
 
Yup, never liked the texture either. Same thing with tapioca. My brother adored it, and my grandmother would make it from scratch for him when we visited. (Blech!) give me chocolate pudding any day instead!
Tapioca is the worst! Ugh. Can't stomach it. My son likes to get the Bubble Tea - milky soda with giant tapioca balls in it! Why??!!
 
While I'm confined indoors I'm going to grind up my old hard tack and make a boiled "plumb duff" with the fine crumbs. I'm actually going to put prunes or "dried plums" in the "plum duff" even though the origins of the term came from "plumb full of dried fruits, etc." Mine'll get some rum soaked dried fruits added before I fill the bag and boil it...

Some Horchata milk-like sweetened drinks use rice in the recipe, and it does apparently dissolve the rice eventually...
Plum duff makes me think of the British Navy - the sort of thing they served on ships (and likely made of hard tack then too)
 
Well, if you don't like little bits of tapioca and/or rice in your puddin' I do believe you'd not think much of the "figgy dowdy" I just made from really old hardtack!

I chopped up a small handful of prunes/ "dried plums" in lieu of figs. I added some dried cranberries. I surveyed the liquor cabinet, and instead of adding the über-authentic-maritime-history rum, I poured a shot (a generous shot, or, in Texan a dude shot) of kirschwasser over the dried fruit, since I'm not likely to make Schwarzwäldertorte any time soon...

I measured out about a cup or so of grinded, pounded up hardtack after I'd dumped it through a sieve to leave aside the larger chunks and chunklets for some other recipe (I'd made lobscouse the day before with chunky bits). To the hardtack I added about three heaping tablespoons of brown sugar. I should have used suet, but I decided to go for butter. I worked about 3/4 or so of a stick of butter into the crumbs until it seemed relatively evenly distributed through the mess. Instead of an egg, I made up a slurry from flax seed and water, and poured that in. Then I added the alcohol and fruit and stirred it all up. Unfortunately, it was too loose and runny, so I added about a handful of oats to it to try to thicken it. Then I scraped it all out into a linen bag, tied it shut, and tossed into a vat or cauldron of salted boiling water and let it go for just over an hour.

It was an ungodly mess, and looked rather poisonous, but I cut it into pieces after I got it out of the sack, and drizzled a bit of black strap molasses over the top. It wasn't too bad! A bit like a somewhat bland "bread pudding" for the most part. From the looks of things, most of the butter simply melted and went through the sack into the boiling water. Sort of an oatmeal porridge made from hardtack. An egg may have held it together better.
 
I'm curious if the rice really will dissolve. I don't much like rice pudding but if the lumps of rice were gone....
If you have lumps in your rice pudding, you may not be making it right (sorry). Use milk (instead of cream) and after adding the milk, stir until the lumps are gone. Actually, it's not unlike making a white sauce. At this stage, instead of a spoon, I use a sprirally thing that I inherited from my mother--but a standard whisk should work just as well.
 
If you have lumps in your rice pudding, you may not be making it right (sorry). Use milk (instead of cream) and after adding the milk, stir until the lumps are gone. Actually, it's not unlike making a white sauce. At this stage, instead of a spoon, I use a sprirally thing that I inherited from my mother--but a standard whisk should work just as well.
Maybe a picture of the spirally thingy??
 
As we run out of "boughten" cookies and cakes, our household is turning to making our own. This recipe, from the Sunbury American (Sunbury, PA), published May 7, 1864, looks like a good one to try -

Poor Man's Pudding. - 3 quarts of milk, 1 teacup of rice; wash the rice, and let it soak in the milk several hours. Flavor with a piece of butter the size of an egg; sugar to the taste, also vanilla, and bake the whole three or four hours, untill the mixture seems creamy. Baking, if properly done, dissolves the rice.

This sounds delicious. How much vanilla do you recommend @lupaglupa? And what oven temperature? Thanks!
 
This sounds delicious. How much vanilla do you recommend @lupaglupa? And what oven temperature? Thanks!
For three quarts of milk I'd think at least 1 tablespoon of vanilla. As to baking temp - it's got to be pretty low too need that long. Maybe 300? I haven't had time to try this yet. It might work better at 350 in a bain marie.
 
For three quarts of milk I'd think at least 1 tablespoon of vanilla. As to baking temp - it's got to be pretty low too need that long. Maybe 300? I haven't had time to try this yet. It might work better at 350 in a bain marie.

Thanks. I might try 300 in a bain marie, since our oven runs a bit hot. Some time ago I made a traditional-style baked rice pudding using that method and it turned out well.
 
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