How many calendar years in a row can start with a sense of dread that this, yet again, could be a rather challenging year, before one has to look the calendar year in the face and admit, ‘perhaps it’s not you, but me?’
It is with this sense of impending ennui that I was drawn consistently, over the space of a few weeks, to multiple iterations of the same thing - rice pudding. Or more broadly, desserts where a starchy sort of carbohydrate - a rice, a noodle or a grain - is boiled or baked in milk and sugar until it is nothing but a thick, sweet, fleece of a dessert that takes you by the cheeks, looks you straight in the eyes and whispers, ‘it is going to be OK. I promise.’
By way of cathartic admission, my gateway pudding in January this year was a tin of Ambrosia. I ate it straight from the tin, still cold, with large spoonfuls of blackberry jam added about three times as I worked my way down towards what I hoped were answers. This magical tin of spurious quality and negligible nutritional value made things feel fine, for a while, but, like anyone chasing their high, subsequent tins had ever-diminishing returns.
Towards the end of last year, I was editing a wonderful little cookbook by a friend, George Ryle, who is the Head Chef at the Garden Cafe at The Garden Museum. The book is full of seasonal splendour and very good cooking, and yet the one recipe that got under my skin and followed me around like the culinary version of ‘Baby shark’ was his ode to rice pudding. His recipe is perfect, it displays the exact tension needed between skill and restraint so that a cook can walk the tightrope from simplicity to sophistication, delighting in how easy it all looks when something difficult is pulled off with nonchalant aplomb. I had to have it.
From George’s perfection, through that tin of ambrosia, via plenty of little pots of Turkish rice pudding, or Indian kheer and payasam secreted in the bottom of myriad takeaway bags, I arrived this week at my stove ready to cook and then bathe in my selected balm for this, yet another spiky year.
Between the age of four and eleven, my sole exposure to rice pudding was in school canteens. Memory, or at least nostalgia, can be an unreliable narrator, but if I ate lunch at school five days a week, it seemed that at a best guess, at least three of those days saw rice pudding, tapioca or semolina pudding slopped up by way of something sweet to send us out into the afternoon. It might be that the desire for jelly and ice cream, or chocolate sponge and chocolate custard, was so strong that every day without one of those present in our little white bowls was a day to be bemoaned, I don’t know, but I do know that I ate more than my fair share of starchy, milky, sweetness at the start of my life.
I don’t know about you, but I was always a child who yearned desperately to fit in. What this meant in the school canteen, in practice, was that if the pervading narrative was that x,y or z was ‘diiissssgggguuuuuuuusting’, then I too felt that to be the immutable truth. ‘Small, please,’ was the disgruntled utterance when the steaming beige slop was proffered my way at the end of a dirty ladle. And yet, if I had been able to be more honest with myself, I would have happily eaten the entire catering tray of the stuff if the snotty lads who seemed to set the agenda had decided that rice pudding was indeed wonderful stuff to be savoured and celebrated. I wonder at the diets of those early culinary influencers now?
Anyway, what I am trying to get to is the fact that I wanted to revisit the full spectrum of British puddings that take a starchy carbohydrate and cook it slowly in milk. As such, pudding rice, fine semolina and tapioca were procured, (at some great difficulty it must be said,) and these were mixed with good milk, some choice aromatics and some sugar, and all baked or boiled until thickened and ready to serve. And what did I find out? Well, I am a philistine at heart, for a start. Not one of the myriad preparations I tried lived up to that tin of Ambrosia, nor the dubious pots of takeaway pudding. Of the preparations I tested, baked tapioca was the standout entry. I topped this with demerara sugar, much like a naughty bowl of porridge, and it was an unexpected treat, (redolent of the best of brown sugar boba tea if you’re looking for a modern-day reference point,) and I would return to it again if the time was right.
My baked rice pudding, a concoction that drew on Simon Hopkinson, the Leith’s Bible and Molly Keane, was certainly of the farmhouse kitchen. The infamous baked skin was a treat for the eyes, but I am yet to learn to delight in it as a delicacy. I also came to the conclusion that despite protestations from recipe writers otherwise, short-grained rice like Arborio or Carnaroli gives you a more pleasing texture in the finished pudding when baked; one where each grain of rice holds its own and is a treat for the mouth, as opposed to the more homogenous mass that pudding rice seems to deliver after two to three hours in the oven.
Semolina pudding is something no one needs. That might be the philistine in me putting his head above the parapet again, but I do feel confident in my position. When, not long from now, it has finally dropped from our culinary vocabulary, not a single soul will shed a tear I’d bet. And for any that do, adding a sprinkling of sugar and a spoonful of jam to some wallpaper paste and revelling for a moment in our lost culinary heritage wouldn't be any worse than suffering a bowl of semolina pudding itself.
I fear I have arrived at an impasse when it comes to rice pudding and its ilk. I crave it and use it as a crutch, that is for sure, and when I do I have a few local dealers, be they my Turkish and Indian takeaways, or my local Aldi, who can sate me with the immediacy I tend to demand. I have enjoyed my baked tapioca, both hot and cold, since making it, but I am under no illusions that I’ll be cooking it again soon. There just isn’t the demand from my nearest and dearest. As for making rice pudding at home, well, against my initial instinct, I am much more for the version that is boiled in milk on the top of the stove, than that which gets baked within; one can control the cookedness of the rice, for a start, and the similarity to the tinned gear isn’t lost on me either.
For those who would like to have a run at any of these versions at home, the cooking of the thing couldn’t simpler. Recipes for the best of them are below, including my version of George’s version, which can be found in its original form in the Garden Cafe cookbook here:
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