Rice pud

Rice pudding is a dish full of memories for me. The best of all was at school in the sixties. The fifth form girls waited on everyone else at lunch time, dragging trolleys out of the kitchens loaded with piles of plates and dishes of hot food. The rice pudding the girls ate was nothing to write home about - sweetened rice and water - but the staff always had the option of a real rice pudding as dessert. The girls on waitress duty ate after everyone else, and if there was any staff rice pudding left, there were squabbles over it. Cooked in the bottom of the oven for at least two hours, it had a hide like a rhino, a creamy texture and you could stand a spoon up in it. The real deal!

Going fast!

Also from my childhood - Sunday lunch always finished with a tin of Ambrosia Creamed Rice between the three of us. Pleasant, but no skin (the best bit).

Rice pudding was on the menu at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, only a few miles from my old school, when I was in for an operation a few years ago. I was really looking forward to that pudding, having not eaten for 24 hours before the operation, then being unable to keep any food down for another two days after the anaesthetic. Horror! It was sweetened with aspartame. Misery! Worst taste in the world!

At school, we girls all studied "domestic science". Everything - measures, temperatures, techniques - was exactly prescribed. It's engrained now - I find it really difficult to sling in a bit of this and a bit of that, or to measure using cups or coffee spoons. "A teaspoon" of something is 5ml, and "a tablespoon" is 15ml. These little measures come as a set, on a ring. I got my first set at the age of 11, when the manufacturers of Stork margarine gave a cookery demonstration. I still have them nearly 50 years later. Yes, I'm brainwashed. But I'm fighting it! It's rarely important for such precision to be at all necessary.

The changes in the recipe for rice pudding in our three copies of the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (GH) reflects the changes in cooking technology over the years, and the relentless rise of the exact measure. Tim's 1954 edition speaks of "a slow oven" - no gas marks or degrees, neither fahrenheit or centigrade. I got the 1965 edition in 1969, when I went to college, entirely in imperial weights and measures and fahrenheit. The 1976 edition in the longère kitchen dates from the interim period when direct translation of imperial into metric, rather than a truly metric recipe, was the norm, with unintentionally hilarious results. So the 1976 GH recipe starts off nicely metric...
45 mls round grain rice (three tablespoons)
30 mls of sugar (two tablespoons)
568 mls of milk (a pint - come on now! I haven't got a burette, should have nicked one from the chem lab when I had the chance)
Freshly ground nutmeg
A knob of butter

Heat the oven to 150 degrees centigrade / 300 Fahrenheit (we're doing OK)
Butter a 900ml ovenproof dish (that's a 1½ pint dish, can you find a 900ml one?).
Wash the rice and put it in the dish with the sugar. Pour on the milk (that's unpasteurised full cream milk from La Borde), top with shavings of butter and grate some nutmeg on the top. Bake for about 2 hours, stirring after half an hour.

Eat on its own or with jam, honey, bottled fruit .. also delicious cold. Serves four.

PS that pie dish is a whole blog entry in itself - we have a Grimwade Patent Perfection pie dish which does the job nicely.
PPS GH has recipes for both rice pudding (baked) and creamed rice (cooked in a saucepan on the hob). Ken's scrumptious recipe for gâteau de riz is therefore based on creamed rice, not rice pudding!

Porridge

Today we awoke to the sort of morning when the mind turns to porridge - a gusting wind whirling out of the southwest, hurling massive raindrops at the windows. At least the snow was starting to melt. The cats took one look and went back to bed - tempting to do the same. And what better breakfast for such a morning than a bowl of hot porridge oats, sweetened in Pauline's case and salty for Tim, but in both cases made with unpasteurised milk (lait cru fermier) from GAEC Lait Grand Cru at La Borde, a farm enterprise in le Grand Pressigny. This milk is the real thing - it comes in plastic pouches (ideal for freezing) which sit in a little plastic jug for pouring, but the cream rises to the top, just as it used to when I was a kid. We separate it into "entier" for coffee - and porridge - and "demi" for tea, and woe betide anyone who doesn't shake before using.

My childhood memory of 'top of the milk' was that largely the cat got it. Our family didn't even have a cat. It was just a neighbour's cat, visiting, and knowing a soft touch when it found one. We now know that cow's milk is bad for cats (sorry guys) so all the more for us!

At La Borde they also prepare crème crue, a natural cream so thick it grabs hold of the spoon, which keeps for ages. And delicious live natural yoghurt. And butter, stamped with designs. And soft cheese with garlic and herbs. And don't get me on to the rice pudding! Oh all right then. This is 1 euro 30 a jar, but the jars are identical with those supplied by Lakeland at 1 euro 20 each, and are ideal for home-made preserves - fruit jellies, lemon curd etc. One jar makes a rich dessert for two people or one gannet. You can buy La Borde products from the farm, or from the stall at Le Grand Pressigny market every thursday. The Spar in GP sells an increasing volume of La Borde milk at 80 cents a litre, and you can also find it in local supermarkets. The only way we could drink milk with a smaller burden of food miles is to have our own cow!

These are some of the La Borde products in our fridge.
The jug was bought from Waitrose in Swaffham.

Easy microwave porridge for one
Weigh out 30g porridge oats in a polythene rice pudding pot. This is transparent, so you can mark the 30g level on the side, for next time. Put in a cereal bowl with 180ml milk. If you are Tim, add a pinch of salt. If you are a Scot, I apologise now. I set the microwave to medium (450 watts), cook the porridge for 2 minutes, stir it, then another 2 minutes at medium. Serve sprinkled with your sweetener of choice, or not as the case may be, and maybe a bit more milk if you like.