Baked Ground-Rice Pudding with White Rice Flour, Adapted from Beeton (1861)

The eggs aren't part of the halving instruction

Recipe 1353 begins as a boiled pudding. Its list gives six tablespoonfuls of ground rice, two pints of milk and four eggs. Only later does the baked alternative appear, directing the cook to halve the ground rice and keep the other ingredients unchanged.

It's an easy instruction to miss when copying a list into a notebook. Halving the entire formula would produce a smaller batch of the boiled mixture, rather than the baked formula Beeton describes. Here the eggs remain four.

That distinction also separates this pudding from her plain baked rice pudding. In that recipe, intact grains go uncooked into milk. Here, the milled rice is heated with milk first, and the eggs are added after the mixture has cooled. The flour isn't a shortcut for the same dish.

A flour with one rice ingredient

Use plain, finely milled white rice flour. Check the ingredient list for white rice; a white-and-brown blend is a different product. Sweet or glutinous rice flour is made from sticky rice and is not the flour specified here. Sweet in that name describes the rice rather than added sugar.

Check other brands just as carefully. Some products named rice flour blend white and brown rice. Others are sold as a coarser ground rice. A familiar-looking bag doesn't establish that its contents match this recipe's flour, and the historical wording doesn't supply a missing modern specification.

Peel, spice or leaf

Beeton offers several flavorings: lemon rind, nutmeg, bitter almonds or bay leaf. They are alternatives, not an instruction to put every one into the saucepan. Lemon is the choice here, so the milk is scented with peel and strained before the pudding is finished.

The suggestion to serve either version with fruit is equally practical. Her list includes stewed fruit, preserves and marmalade. A spoonful beside the pudding would add a separate fruit flavor; it doesn't require changing the milk base or treating lemon peel as a source of juice.

A spooned pudding

This version is served from its baking dish. Let it settle briefly before spooning, and check the center as well as the top when deciding whether it's done. Browned milk on the surface can't establish that an egg mixture underneath has finished cooking.

Keep the dish shallow when making more. A deeper center would have farther to heat even if the ingredient arithmetic were correct. For a larger table, two dishes preserve the intended depth and give you two puddings to check separately.