Rice Pudding

I have always liked rice pudding, whether it be the kind you buy in tins in shops (i.e. Ambrosia Rice Pudding) or whether the kind that my mother used to make when I was a kid. My memory of the home-made kind is unspecific but definite – the taste, the texture, the brown and crispy skin that I remember not liking particularly. My thoughts of the tinned kind revolve mostly around eating it for breakfast almost every day of a three week cycle touring trip around Ireland with my friend James in the late summer of our first year at university (1984). More recently, tinned rice pudding (or the same product in small plastic pots) has been an occasional food at homes when hunger pangs have struck or when I have felt in need of sustenance after a long run. I like tinned rice pudding but it’s not the same as the home-made kind and for years I have meant to make some (having never made it before). A few years ago I got as far as buying a packet of pudding rice, but that sat in the kitchen cupboard unopened until the use by date was well gone and the rubbish bin became its home…

Gripped by a new desire to make rice pudding that came from I know not where, on Saturday I popped to the local supermarket and bought some rice and amazingly, given my extreme talent for thinking about doing things but not actually doing them, at about 5pm I set to work. First, the rice was added to milk and left to stand for 30 minutes. Then, a small amount of caster sugar added (poison alert…) and finally a little nutmeg sprinkled on the top and the mix put into the oven. The recipe I was following suggested a time of 2-2.5 hours at 130 degrees would do the job but by mid evening it was clear that a bit more energy was needed and so the oven temperature went up to 150 degrees and by about 8:30pm the finished pudding came out. Here is proof, albeit rather blurry proof:

I’m pleased to be able to report that my rice pudding was absolutely delicious, both straight out of the oven on Saturday evening and, again, cold on Sunday – just as I remembered it only this time I quite liked the skin. There is absolutely no way that it will be years before I make rice pudding again. In fact, given that I hardly made a dent on the bag of rice I reckon it could be just days until I get busy in the kitchen again.